Win7 - Opening "Programs and Features" as Admin from command line (logged in as regular user)

Solution 1:

Is there any particular reason you're trying to do this from the command-line as opposed to built-in features available in the UI? Also, might there be a system policy that's preventing you from performing these operations?

Here's a suggestion using the UI:

1. Open the Start Menu
2. In the Search Bar, type appwiz.cpl.
3. Wait for appwiz.cpl to appear in the search results. There should be only one entry at the top, under "Programs". It should have a document icon with some gears on it, and should be automatically highlighted.
4. With appwiz.cpl highlighted in the search results, press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER. This will force Windows to attempt executing appwiz.cpl with Administrator privileges.
5. Respond to any UAC prompts as appropriate.

If the above does not work, there may be an issue with your system's Security Policy. Do the following to check:

1. Log into the system under an account that has Administrator permissions.
2. Press Win+R.
3. Type secpol.msc and hit ENTER.
4. Respond to any UAC prompts as appropriate.
5. In the left pane, navigate the tree to the following location:

   Security Settings\Local Policies\Security Options

6. Find the "User Account Control" options, near the bottom of the list.
7. Check the setting User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for standard users
   • If it is set to Automatically deny elevation requests, you will not be able to use Administrator permissions while running under a standard user account.
   • If this is set to any of the Prompt for credentials... settings, and the above process for running appwiz.cpl elevated still does not work for you, then you may have a different problem.

Solution 2:

For whatever reason, the control panel applets inherit the privileges of the running Desktop shell (which is the Windows equivalent of a window manager). To escalate permissions in the control panel, you have to escalate permissions in this shell, via these steps:

1. Open a command prompt as an administrative user
2. Kill the running explorer process
   1. Ctl+Shift+Esc Open task manager, and navigate to the processes tab
   2. Find the explorer.exe process(es), and kill all of them. (Right-click, choose End Process) Your taskbar, desktop, and explorer windows will all disappear, but your command prompt will remain
3. From that admin command prompt, run explorer.exe
4. Now, you should be able to open appwiz.cpl, or any other control panel applet with administrative privileges.
5. When you're done, kill the running explorer process(es), and run explorer.exe as the logged-in user.

Caveat: This can lose certain settings, or break your normal desktop environment. For instance, any network paths which have been mounted to a drive will be lost.