Has anyone been successful at launching an instance of Windows Explorer in the SYSTEM account on Windows Vista or 7? It is possible to do this on XP, but I haven't been able to get it to completely work in Vista or 7.
Trying to launch Explorer as SYSTEM into session 1 (my user session) results in Explorer exiting immediately and returning an error code of 1.
I can launch Explorer as SYSTEM into session 0 with the following command:
psexec -i 0 -s explorer
That will create an instance of explorer running as SYSTEM with a taskbar and start menu on the hidden session 0 desktop, but won't let you open a file browser window. If you switch to the hidden session 0 desktop and try to open an Explorer window from there to browse files, the following error message appears:
"The server process could not be started because the configured identity is incorrect. Check the username and password."
I have set the following registry key to 1 for my user account and the SYSTEM account:
\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\SeparateProcess
There has got to be a way to make this work? If it is not possible, can anyone explain why?
-Rob
Best Answer
Kill all your exploreres
Then launch
Your taskbar will be runing as system so everything you open via it will be runing as system.
After you finish kill it again and open a normal explorer via Task Manager
(Ctrl-Shift-Esc)