Back in the day, I was a good Windows admin and did my administration using the Windows Server admin tools from my workstation, logged in with a non-admin user, using the RunAs shell feature (shift+right-click) to start the admin tool with administrator credentials.
Vista’s “Run as administrator†feature will run a program with elevated (i.e., administrator) rights, but with the credentials of the current user. The runas.exe shell command provides a way to execute a command with different credentials, but they aren’t elevated.
Now, granted that it is rare that I need to run a tool both as a different users and have elevated rights on the local system. It can happen, though.
Sysinternals provides a handy utility called ShellRunAs, which provides the RunAs feature, and I found a forum post suggesting a method for getting “Run elevated as a different user†functionality.
I haven’t tried it, yet, but I wanted to share the solution.
