I know this has been asked before because I already tried every answer I could google up. Please read through before marking it as duplicate.
My home machine has two accounts set up:
- one simple unprivileged user
- another administrator account with full control over everything
There are times when I would need to perform some action which requires administrator rights, such as deleteing something from C:\ . For the love of all that is holy I cannot convince the windows file explorer that it is running with administrator account with full control over everything. I tried:
- running as administrator which prompts UAC to ask for username and password at which point I use the admin account
- shift right click and choose run as different user at which point I receive the same prompt as above
- running command prompt with the admin account and starting explorer.exe from there
- checking the Run as administrator option in the advanced properties of the explorer shortcut
- the suggestions from this superuser answer and failed
- running various combinations of the
runas
command through an elevated command prompt
Every single time I want to perform some privileged action on some privileged file I get either the access denied message or another message stating my user is not in the administrators group. Even when I try to take ownership of a folder (from myself, because I am already the owner of it and all its contents) it tells me access denied.
And yes, I do have the rights to do anything and everything because if I use command prompt with the admin account I can rmdir, mkdir, etcdir all day long without any issues. I can even start free commander with admin account and do whatever without any problems. Why is the file explorer so stubborn?
The reason I have set up two accounts is that I like to remote into this machine, using RDP, from work for example. Only the unprivileged account is allowed to RDP into this machine. I cannot and do not want to allow RDP with the administrator account. This is just to explain why I don't log in with the administrator account but this does not affect the issue. Even when I am at home and log in with the admin account I experience the same problem with an elevated file explorer window.
It is not a corrupted window installation, this very same problem occurs on a fresh clean install after the hard drive has been formatted.