Welcome Back Run As Administrator

After upgrading to Windows 8.1 on my home computer, I lost the Run As Administrator functionality from normal user accounts. The Administrator accounts no longer prompted at all and the limited user (normal) accounts would say:

C:\Path\To\Program.exe
Your system administrator has blocked this program. For more information, contact your system administrator.

It wouldn’t matter what program I tried with, they all claimed to be blocked when launched with the Run As Administrator right-click menu option. I don’t use the feature often, just when some program like Notepad++ wants to update and I don’t want to switch out to an Administrator account to do it. Even more restricting is when I wanted to tweak the Family Safety settings. Overall the experience felt very restrictive to the way I’ve used Windows for the past several years.

Countless searches failed to find the solution, probably because my key words were wrong. I was positive it happened with the upgrade from Windows 8 to 8.1, but no one else seemed to have had the same experience. I got so frustrated with it that I reached out to Microsoft support twice and hung on long enough that they did a remote desktop session. No dice. Until today. Today I searched for windows run as administrator blocked and found “Run As Administrator” Blocked on WindowsExplored.com.

My error message is a little different than theirs, mine doesn’t mention it being blocked by group policy, but I decided to dig a little further into ConsentPromptBehaviorUser. Two things are now pointing to the Policy Editor.

I have Windows 8.1 Professional so I have the Group Policy Editor, though I’ve never used it. I decided to give it a go just to see what value it set to the registry instead of editing it directly as in the Windows Explored article did.

Switching the setting to the default Prompt setting (not the prompt with secure desktop one) set the registry DWORD value to 3, just as in the Windows Explored article and now, very happily, Run As Administrator works again from my regular limited user account!

Wanted: Picture and Fax Viewer

As a developer when I am working on Windows Desktop programs I take lots of screen shots. (The Snipping Tool is very handy for this by the way.) Then when I want to view a sequence of them I have just double clicked and had the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer open the photo. I would often use it to scroll through a few screen shots and zoom in and zoom out. Occasionally I may print a shot or two out to discuss with others and write some notes on.

In Windows 8 the default image viewing program is the Photos "Windows Store App" by Microsoft. When I double click a photo it takes over and goes full screen. That was a little jarring to my normal work-flow but manageable, I could drag it to the second monitor. The real trouble started when I wanted to view more than one photo. I could not figure out how to get more than one to show up to scroll through. The Pictures Library said it had two ("Pictures library         2") photos on the app's start screen, and when I clicked Pictures Library, it then said it only had one ("Pictures library 1 file"), despite the fact that my Pictures folder is chock-full of images. I read in the store reviews and other places online that I am not the only one experiencing this issue. One guy in the store pointed out that you can't print a picture from the app (at least there is no obvious interface that he or I can find.) I tried both fix solutions suggested by Microsoft Support Engineer Nithyananda J, re-installing the app and running the Modern UI App troubleshooter. No dice.

My fix for the Photos app is to avoid it. Just go to the Default Programs control panel and Associate a file type or protocol with a program and change as many of the image types that are currently associated with the Photos app to Windows Photo Viewer that you want. Now forward and back navigation buttons and printing are all right in front of me and they all work the way I'm use to.

Do you have another built-in or Windows Store app that works better?

No MS Virt For You!

As a developer I have found having virtual machine images the best thing since sliced bread when it comes to testing installs onto a clean system and to target multiple versions of MS Windows from the convenience of my desktop. I had been using Virtual PC since it was aquired from Connectix and appreciated the drag-and-drop easiness of moving my installer files onto the target machine and it's overall integration into my desktop environment.

I should have researched this key tool before upgrading but I didn't. After switching and attempting to install Virtual PC I found out that it is no longer supported. No big deal, everyone says to switch to Hyper-V, it's new and therefore better and the  System Center Virtual Machine Manager is suppose to be able to convert Virtual PC images to work with the Windows 8 Pro built-in Client Hyper-V. When I went to Control Panel > Programs > Turn Windows features on or off, I found that Hyper-V Platform was disabled. When I hover over the option it says "Hyper-V cannot be installed. The processor does not have second level address translation (SLAT) capabilities." So, like the NX bit fiasco with some other systems, my hardware is not up to snuff for the latest and greatest from Microsoft.

What about an older version of Virtual PC? Virtual PC (for Windows 7) required Windows validation, and that tool failed with error 0x80096002, most likely due to the tool being for Windows 7, so no Windows 7 Virtual PC for me. Virtual PC 2007 SP1 "has compatibility issues".

VirtualBox to the rescue!

I had been using VirtualBox for my Debian and Ubuntu images because it was such a pain to get them going under Virtual PC. I had also used it to preview the Windows 8 RC because again Virtual PC was picky. It worked great on Vista as long as you ran the versions of Windows it wanted to target, otherwise it was not so good but VirtualBox "just worked". I had preferred Virtual PC for it's smoother desktop integration but now I was forced to switch.

I stressed unnecessarily for a bit trying to find a conversion tool that would switch from Virtual PC format files to VirtualBox ones. There are two sets of files used by both camps, an XML configuration/settings file (.vmc and .vbox) and a hard disk image file (.vhd and .vdi). VirtualBox can open the Virtual PC vhd disk image files, so no conversion is needed there. All you need to do is create a new virtual machine, choose your settings and select the existing disk image. I opened the vmc file in a text editor to see what settings I was using before, mostly for the memory but also to see what kind of devices I had attached. Since both use an XML format I still find it surprising that there is no import option in VirtualBox or conversion tool.

Once VirtualBox had the new virtual machines pointing at the old vhd files it wasn't very much more work to get things working again. Since I wasn't expecting the trouble I hadn't been proactive and removed the Virtual PC guest additions before switching. So, when I booted into each Windows VM the mouse didn't work at all and they kept offering to install a bunch of hardware. I declined all offers and used the keyboard to get to the Control Panel and uninstall the guest additions and reboot. This got the mouse working. I went ahead and installed the VirtualBox guest additions and then accepted the driver installations.

Only one system required a little more work than this. It must have been using the IDE interface previously and VirtualBox setup the drive using the SATA interface by default for that version of windows. To fix the problem I just had to remove the disk image under the SCSI interface and add it under the IDE one. After booting up it saw the SATA interface and added it's drivers. I shutdown and moved the image back and booted without any trouble. Some tutorials have you get into the hardware control panel and remove devices. For whatever reason that wasn't necessary in my case.

Windows Live Anyway, Or Not

Despite all this seemingly integrated Microsoft Account (aka Windows Live ID) stuff in Windows 8, in order to submit product mapping information to SysDev, I must install either Windows Live Essentials or Windows Live ID Sign-In Assistant.

Fine, whatever. Windows Essentials 2012 it is, with Writer (I might use it for blogging here instead of the Blogger web editor) and Live Messenger. It seems so odd that they continue to bundle this a month before Skype is suppose to take over.

After I installed and logged in, the first advertisement was about how Skype is replacing Messenger.

Skype and Windows Live Messenger are coming together. Update to Skype, sign in with your Messenger ID and your contact list and the IM feature will be there.

So, I downloaded the client (the Desktop application) and it says that since my contacts will be moving from Messenger to Skype, they will be uninstalling Messenger. No ifs, ands or buts. No options. Just uninstalling.

A few jiffies later and I'm asked to provide my Microsoft account to sign in. We're in the final stretch and then...

Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again.

I had tried the Windows Store App version of skype first, and it gave me almost the same message:

Oops...there was a problem

Skype is having some issues. Please restart the application and all should be well. If it isn't, get in touch with customer support.

Dragging the Skype App close and starting it several times did not resolve the problem, and customer support just means a FAQ page that attempts to match your problem with a known answer and despite web search results to the contrary, the page acts like this isn't a known issue.

Now I'm back to the lame Windows Store Messenger App.

OK, I'll play their game. The FAQ search is no help. Scroll down and Get more help. Another search, but this time a promise that if it doesn't work I can Get more help. Search again for trouble signing in and click Get more help again.

Guess what, to get more help you have to sign in and the form looks a lot like the Windows Store Skype App. Hope starts to abandon ship. Fine, one more shot. Sign in with the Microsoft Account, and it accepts me. Then tell it I'm new to Skype (again just like in the Skype App) and... it works. I'm signed in to the web site with my Windows Live ID. Windows + Tab and try the same in the Skype App. Success. Alt + Tab and try the same in the Skype Desktop Application and it works.

Already I see I can send and receive files in Skype but only if the other person is also using Skype. We'll see how group chat goes tomorrow.

O Messenger, Messenger, wherefore art thou Messenger?

A day into re-configuring my computer and re-installing all the main development applications I use and I've come across my first "the bad", with a potential to also be one of "the ugly". Messaging.

Since some kind of Windows Messenger client has been pretty ubiquitous with Windows starting with XP we have come to enjoy the convenience of the client around the office. When lunch time comes we pull together a quick multi-person chat and place our order. When someone wants to share a screen shot or a file, it's a simple drag-and-drop operation and then chat a little about what you are both looking at.

From time to time Microsoft's messenger servers are not available and over a month ago they were doing something very odd that was killing not only Messenger sessions but computer performance on a few computers at the office. Some people worked around the issue by using the Web interface for the day or two of trouble. Others just shutdown messenger during the event. I tried third-party clients and found none of them to be affected. (This lead me to believe the issue was with some advertisement being sent to the client.) These issues make me occasionally dream of a local messaging service, either using a peer to peer local network auto-discovery system or an XMMP based system hosted with our mail server. The rest of the time Live Messenger serves us well.

The Windows Store Messenger app has not served me well. It all started out looking simple enough. A purple rectangle on the Start screen says Messaging. Giving it my Windows Live ID pulled in all my Live Messenger contacts into People and I could chat. Success, but it was short lived.

When the call for lunch came, I didn't get a single message. Several tests showed that I no longer get messages that are sent to multiple recipients and I can't figure out how to invite multiple contacts into a conversation that I start. No soup for me I guess.

Later in the day one of my co-workers seemed to start babbling out of context. I couldn't figure out what in the world they were talking about. Finally they asked about the screen shot they had started the conversation off with. I never received it, or even a notification that one was sent and failed. Now I have to watch for this and warn them that the Microsoft Windows 8 Store Messaging App is even more gimped than the third-party program I was previously using.

Finally, and most troublesome, if I miss the noise and the little alert text that flashes into Desktop mode for a moment, and don't occasionally switch to the Messaging app, I have no idea that people have sent me something. I miss my glowing toolbar button!

I have searched, so far in vain, for a reason or a fix or a replacement. I think I can install the old Live Messenger client in Desktop mode, but people complain about getting duplicate sign-in notifications a lot going that route.

I wonder if Microsoft even cares about the feature drop, seeings as they seem intent on pulling the plug on the Messenger client anyway.

Explorer Reloaded

There is something off about folder refreshing in Windows 8. I've been spending a lot of time copying or moving files from my old drives to where I want them on the new drives and without fail, Windows 8 fails to refresh the folder view as soon as a file is copied, moved, or deleted. It will update, sometime, and I can force it to update sooner by pressing F5, but it takes it's sweet time about it. That's ugly.

Conjunction Junction, what's your function?

The new drives look great. Newegg delivers again. I am intrigued by the VelociRaptor's use of a 2.5" hard drive. I hope that the reduced surface area leads to increased data density and better response times. Time to install.

My first attempt was following the instructions posted by Kari on eightforums.com using the System Preparation Tool answer file. I was already leaning more and more towards the junction option and concerned about having the right offline image source name, but I stumbled even before that. I was either typing the command wrong or had done something really wrong with the syntax. No dice.

My next attempt was using the mklink command to junction the Users folder to the new drive, but I tried it after I had logged in once and got a lot of file permission errors with the XP/Vista compatibility junctions that had been created in the first user's account. I wonder if part of the issue was the copy command just not being up to it. Perhaps I should have used robocopy as Garth Metzger does. His instructions are much simpler. Another write-up can be found on Life Hacker.

Since I hadn't done anything important I decided to reformat and give the junction trick a go again, this time stopping early to Audit Mode as suggested in the system prep tool instructions. Then I did the junction trick instead of messing with the answers file, rebooted and then continued with the Personalize step of the Windows 8 installation.

Now all my User files are really on the HDD. This junction method works much better than rewriting a bunch of Registry keys or setting a default location. Hard coded apps think they are writing to C:\Users. Since the junction is from a folder on one drive to a folder on another drive, there are no strange rules and behavior for drive roots like you get when you assign a mount point to a folder path. It doesn't relocate just some of my data as . I think I could have ignored Kari's warning about ProgramData and done the same.

Now I'm clicking away getting my user accounts setup. I decided to make a Local Account for day-to-day work and a Microsoft Account for testing that feature out later.