Runas Windows Explorer in Windows 7

Solution 1:

First of all, thank you everyone for the responses.

An update on this. If I make the target domain user a local administrator, I'm able to start Explorer with runas command. However, the new instance of explorer does not start under a different user's credentials.

Apparently, starting with Vista, MS no longer allows multiple instances of explorer.exe with different credentials. It was mentioned here

Anyway, I'm officially giving up on it and looking for a standalone explorer replacement which can be run with RunAs.

Solution 2:

I see this on programs that lock access to a file or do not have permission to write/access a particular file. I see it a lot with Notepad++ so I just save it to the desktop then copy it over when working on system files. There might be some slight modifications that the developers of those programs may need to do or the way Windows 7 handles it. I see it more in Win2k8 though.

Solution 3:

I sought the advice our microsoft tam and now use Explorer++ you can download it from www.explorerplusplus.com Below is the advice I recieved.

In Win7 we now block launching Explorer in another context. You may have to install a file manager application to do this trick http://blogs.technet.com/elevationpowertoys/archive/2009/11/20/explore-as-administrator-powertoy.aspx

Or

You can launch Explorer in another context provided you kill the first instance before you make the second one, because it’s single instance.

But this would be a wrong way to do and it will be an unsupported scenario, also it would cause some issues.