XP and application permissions

Is it possible to set up applications so that they ALWAYS
run in the context of administrator? We are a school, and
must run some programs that require administrative rights
on machines, but we don't want to give students full
rights to the machine. Using the "Run As..." option won't
really help, since that will give them a username and
password with admin rights. Any ideas?

"Dave B" <dbranscome@ross.org> wrote in message
news:cc3f01c38237$d2dce550$a601280a@phx.gbl...
> Is it possible to set up applications so that they ALWAYS
> run in the context of administrator?

No. At least not easily when it is not your application
so that you can redesign it.

> We are a school, and
> must run some programs that require administrative rights
> on machines, but we don't want to give students full
> rights to the machine. Using the "Run As..." option won't
> really help, since that will give them a username and
> password with admin rights. Any ideas?
>

If the students use a generic account or two and you use
Pro then use of the /savecred switch of RunAs may help.
If they have individual accounts this is not really a useful,
although possible, option as it requires logging in to each
account to set it up (initially and whenever the password
for the account used to RunAs changes).

You can force-feed the credential into into RunAs by
using a small script to launch the app, but even with
script munging the username/password are recoverable
by the industrious student.

The better solution is to tweak things so that the app will
run as a plain user (assuming that the app is just a bad app
and so needing admin rather than it doing things that are
absolutely tied to admin privs).

--
Roger Abell
Microsoft MVP (Windows, Security)
MCSE (W2k3,W2k,Nt4) MCDBA