Microsoft is Pinky

“Brain: It must be inordinately taxing to be such a boob. Pinky: You have no idea.”

I have an application I’d like to run on Windows 10, that invokes the UAC (User Account Controls) every time it runs. I’d like to turn off UAC for just this one program.

Nope. No can do

(BTW, I really wanted to link to a clip from Pinky and The Brain, for “Brain: It must be inordinately taxing to be such a boob”, but Youtube / Google gets completely hung up over that word “boob”)

The obvious first step is to change the shortcut to launch the .exe to “Run As Administrator”. Doesn’t work.

There is an article in the Microsoft support forums that says one can configure Windows to run a chosen program without invoking the UAC. It involves downloading their Accessibility Toolkit, which allows Windows to be altered for people with muscular dystrophy (for example). Stupid extra keystrokes for people who have a hard time manipulating a keyboard can be done away with, which is a good thing.

And if Microsoft can’t figure out how to suppress the UAC for the one program for regular users, well, maybe us regular users can shoe-horn the accessibility toolkit into getting Windows to be helpful instead of annoying.

Nope. Doesn’t work. The program I reconfigured does now have an updated icon, to indicate that UAC will be invoked when I want to run it. But all I wanted was to click the icon, and the program works.

My choice is now between “turn off UAC completely” or “every time I run this program, get stopped and slapped in the face with the reminder of how bad at programming Microsoft is”.

Well, I’ve learned that sometimes, it’s better to be happy than to be right, so UAC is getting turned off, system-wide. It’s stupid.

Microsoft is such a boob.