full-disclosure - Windows user privileges

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From: prp17 at adelphia.net (Phillip R. Paradis)
Subject: Windows user privileges

> >>is that windowed applications do not get polled for refresh, so for
> >>example using an explorer instance in a runas will not 
> update the file
> >>listing until you press "F5" I have witnessed bad things 
> come of this
> 
> Are we able to run Explorer.exe using runas utility...

Yes, but it won't do much good. The instance running as your second user will
simply detect the first instance in memory and tell it to open a new window,
then terminate. The window will be opened by an already-running instance of
explorer.exe, not the one you just started, and will therefore have the
permissions of the original user who logged in, not those of the user specified
to RunAs.

If you first kill all running instances of Explorer.exe from the task manager
(or using the kill utility) and then start explorer via RunAs (from the command
prompt) it will restart the shell as a different user, and you can then open an
explorer window with the permissions you want. Then kill and restart
explorer.exe again to restart the shell as the original user. (Be sure to do so
from an instance of task manager or a command prompt that is still running in
the original user's context.) IIRC, you can also simply "log off" from the
shell, and it will restart as the original user.