It has been almost three months now since I have taken the plunge and removed myself from the administrators group and started doing everything with a less privileged account. I’ve found that it greatly changes the way you think about writing certain pieces of code.

One thing that has been bugging me for a while is the apparent inability to access windows explorer from this non-privileged account via the runas command. However, Peter Torr has a great tip to get around this.

From your admin console, navigate to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced and set SeparateProcess DWORD to 0x01.