Tuesday, January 26, 2021

Quick Assist elevating

My preferred method of working around the pause screen when it stops you dead on a quick assist session attempting anything that challenges using user account control (UAC).  I say now that it requires the user to click the yes button on a UAC prompt when you launch regedit.  After that this technique lowers the default UAC level until it is set back to the default setting.  I had to use this approach to help a user during the pandemic.  Normally I would have just waited until the next time I went round to visit.

Run cmd as the user and then

runas /user:admin cmd.exe

This then prompts for the password and you have a cmd window running as the admin; but it is not elevated.  If you attempted to run a software installer which required elevation you you still get the pause screen while the user was prompted about if they wanted to run the installer and change the computer settings etc.

At this point run regedit.exe and request that the user selects the Yes button. Regedit is now elevated.

Under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

set
PromptOnSecureDesktop from 1 (default) to 0
ConsentPromptBehaviorUser 1 (default) to 3

Note the US spelling of Behavior!

UAC prompts will no longer cause pause screens.  It is possible to launch a cmd.exe (Run As Administrator) to make it fully elevated.

This is based on a remoting into a standalone workgroup computer.  Attempting similar on a domain computer would still work however group policy could reverse the settings at anytime.  It is therefore probably not as useful for domain joined computers with group policies.