Tag: Shimming

Yesterday I blogged about the classic shim for suppressing the UAC prompt for certain applications. To determine why an application requests an UAC prompt you can look at the application manifest, if it has one at all. The handy little tool ManifestView lets you load an EXE file and see which requested execution level the developers have set for it.

If you should find the requested execution level to be set to something you do not like, for instance “runAsAdministrator” when what you actually want to do is to run is as a standard user, you can apply a shim to the EXE file to solve that problem. Be aware that most of the times the higher execution level is set for a reason but that does not mean you can still fix the problem, sometimes by modifying file and registry permissions for instance.

If you during your way in testing app compatibility with Windows 7 encounter an application that require a UAC prompt to launch you can suppress this UAC prompt by creating a more or less classic shim “RunAsInvoker”. A few years ago Microsoft posted this as a KB article but not long after it vanished. Now the guide for creating this shim is available in Ask The Performance Team blog and I strongly suggest you put this shimming tip in mind because it might come in handy when you least expect it.