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Under Windows 7, I open an explorer window as administrator. How can I tell that this explorer window has admin privileges?

Either a visual indicator (e.g. an annotation on the icon or in the title bar) or some simple way of finding out (e.g. via a menu entry) would do.

This unanswered question asks for a more general feature; I'm primarily interested in Explorer. This related question asks about an application; this is not good enough for me since I have both admin and unprivileged instances of Explorer running: I need per-window information.

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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1 Answers1

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Aaron Margosis wrote an Extension to show in Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer its current elevation/IL level status:

  • Low IL = protected mode
    Low IL screenshot
  • Medium IL = normal operation
    Medium IL screenshot
  • High IL = administrator
    High IL screenshot

Expand the Zip and register the DLLs with regsvr32:

regsvr32 path\PrivBar.dll
regsvr32 path\PrivBarx64.dll

Then enable the toolbar from the menu: “View” → “Toolbars” → “PrivBar” (or “PrivBar x64”, whichever appears). Repeat this in Internet Explorer to get the toolbar there as well.

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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magicandre1981
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  • Thanks. I've activated the toolbars and they always show “Medium IL” now, but explorer is apparently running as administrator since I can create a directory in c:\. I see Medium and apparent admin privileges whether I run Explorer simply by clicking on the icon/filename or I use “Run as administrator” and get a UAC prompt. Is my test for admin mode wrong or is PrivBar wrong? – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Apr 26 '17 at 16:17
  • By default it is blocked to run Explorer as admin. You need to unlock it. Use my hack to allow Explorer to be running as admin. – magicandre1981 Apr 27 '17 at 04:33
  • Evidently I did manage to run Explorer with some kind of privileges, because initially I couldn't create a directory under c:\ and after selecting “run as administrator” in the start menu I could create that directory. But the user interface does confuse me. This is on a corporate install which may have different settings from a default Windows 7 installation. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Apr 27 '17 at 07:51
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    you don't need admin rights to create new folders. you nee admin rights to store files in C: or edit the files there. – magicandre1981 Apr 27 '17 at 15:35
  • any update? Does it work the way you want it? – magicandre1981 May 01 '17 at 07:00
  • It still shows me “Medium IL” and I don't understand whether it's running as admin or not. When I don't have urgent work I'll try rebooting to see if this is the effect of cached credentials somewhere. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' May 01 '17 at 10:00
  • and what is your issue? this means it runs as normal user, NO admin . Is this SOOOOO hard to understand. I see you are a *nix user, but you should understand medium = normal user, high = admin. – magicandre1981 May 01 '17 at 17:37