therube wrote:Now you're saying a right-click on a shortcut & "Run as...", selecting an Administrators account vs. a command-line RUNAS, or am I missing it?
Run as... and
runas should use the same functions internally. The difference is with
Run as Admin introduced with UAC.
Now that I tested with Windows XP, I can confirm the behavior (and I can also remember that I
encountered it
before in my XP days). The problem is that
control is just a "shortcut" that starts an
explorer window with the Control Panel open. If you run
control,
explorer (or anything else that depends on
explorer), it will use the already running instance of
explorer (which maintains your desktop and taskbar). But since
explorer's running as a different user, something fails and the window is never shown. Sometimes the fail is silent (I guess more often on XP than on 7), sometimes it shows the error dialog.
To dig deeper into the problem: there are several possibilities why the operation fails, not neccessarily exclusive - maybe one possibility applies in one kind of situations and the other in... well, those others. I think we can say one thing for sure:
explorer checks mutexes before it initializes itself. But what happens afterwards?
1] upon encountering one, it tries to communicate with an existing
explorer, but it hasn't got the correct privileges or namespace.
2] upon encountering one that belongs to a different user, it just gives up.
... AND! During the writing of this post, I have tried several scenarios and settings and may have gotten a solution for you.
x] One good thing to know is, you can kill
explorer and replace it with an instance running under a different user. (Start
cmd and
taskmgr, kill
explorer and start
runas /user:<whoever> explorer.) It will produce an environment very similar to the one you get by logging in as that user - an added bonus is that you can have more than one of such "desktops" running under the same user account.
x] There's an option for
explorer that, if set, will instruct it to open a new process for every new window, effectively bypassing all that mutex machinery. It can be found in
Folder Options > View > Advanced settings > Files and Folders > Launch folder windows in a separate process, or set by a simple program
Xtra Windows Stability, which I prefer because it aggregates several options similar to this one.
Ελληνικά rulez.
.