WinBatch Studio and UAC

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Question:

WinBatch Studio appears to be marked to run with "Highest Available" privileges. At least for my own purposes, the only reason WinBatch Studio appears to need anything other than standard user permissions is to write licensing info to the registry. Once I've entered my licensing data, I never need to have elevated permissions again. Nevertheless, on a machine with UAC enabled, every time I launch WinBatch Studio, I get prompted for which context to run it in. On my network, that means typing in my password every time I launch the app, even though I don't need admin rights. It's ugly.
I believe WinBatch Studio could handle this more gracefully. The main Studio EXE could be set to run "as invoker", and whenever it needs to perform an admin task (such as putting licensing data in the registry), it could spawn a second executable set to run "highest available" or "admin".

UAC, love it or loathe it, is here to stay and many are opting not to disable it (I've found workarounds for all of my RunWithLogon woes so I personally think disabling it is more of a convenience than a necessity). I'd like it if WinBatch behaved better under these circumstances. At the moment it stands out as one of the only two apps in our organization throwing needless UAC dialogs.

Answer:

Some WinBatch functions do not always work properly without elevation, including many that involve interprocess communication between processes running at different security levels and those that involve file system access (Some/most of the functions with potential elevation requirements are documented as such in the help file.) So the need for elevation may be a little more extensive than you realize.

For several version WinBatch has shipped with 7 different WinBatch Studio and WinBatch exes that cover all the possible manifest combinations. File extension associations are used to control which version of an exe is launched when a file is executed or opened.

Recommendation:
Instead of the default WinBatch Studio, make a shortcut to 'C:\Program Files\WinBatch\System\WBStudio_IF.exe' and use that for WinBatch Studio.exe. Or even delete WinBatch Studio.exe and make a copy of the above file and name it WinBatch Studio.exe instead.

User Reply:

Thanks, WBStudio_IT.exe does the trick just fine.

Article ID:   W17494

File Created: 2008:04:10:15:11:32

Last Updated: 2008:04:10:15:11:32

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