Ctrl+Shift to Run as Administrator No Longer Works

Holding Ctrl+Shift while clicking on a shortcut (or in the Start Menu’s search box) no longer works to run as administrator. Specifically, nothing happens; no UAC prompt and the program does not run at all.

I can still run things as administrator by using the run as admin context-menu item on the EXE, but not on shortcuts to it. I can also run as admin if the run as admin property of a shortcut is checked and the shortcut is opened normally. Also, EXEs that have the admin flag (those with the shield icon overlay) work either directly or through the shortcut. It is non-admin programs that cannot be manually run as admin.

The only notable change since this behavior that I can think of is that I disabled the Win-key hotkeys (NoWinKeys=1), but that should not be related.

Does anyone know what could be causing this? I thought that maybe something in the shortcut handler (HKCR\lnkfile) was corrupted, but it looks okay.

I have had UAC turned off for quite a while now

I suspected that UAC was off while reading the question.

A lot of people misunderstand what the "Run As Administrator" option does. That has nothing to do with using an account named Administrator or an account that is part of a group named Administrators. It has everything to do with running a program in a way where UAC will recognize that the program has elevated privileges. The "Run As Administrator" option does not affect what user account is being used to run the program.

(I wish the option was called "Run Elevated". As is, the phrasing of that option has confused a lot of people.)

Call it a confusingly-named option if you like, but if you Shift+"Right-click" an icon, you may see the "Run As Administrator" option only if UAC is enabled. Otherwise, that item simply won't exist. This might have changed a bit with newer operating systems, but this is how this worked in Windows 7 (and Windows Vista).

Therefore, I'm not at all surprised that this keyboard shortcut doesn't work. I haven't regularly used this shortcut, but it sounds like this shortcut simply performs the functionality of a feature that just doesn't even exist unless UAC is enabled.