In my previous post I have outlined how to override default UAC settings on a case-by-case basis. As luck would have it, just a few days ago I had a need to format my PC. While I could, and did, backup most of everything important, I happened to forget about this minor issue of UAC override.
And instantly I hit a wall, as while I could, indeed, override the UAC, I stumbled upon two issues; annoying enough that I decided to share it, just so you can avoid my (silly) mistakes.
The app would start, but not as silently as I'd have liked
As you can remember, my use-case was to auto-launch everything.exe, as a backbone for Wox. Problem is, with the setup I outlined, it would launch normally, as a windowed app, whereas I wanted it minimized and in tray, from the start.
Task Scheduler doesn't offer such options. But it does offer ability to launch apps with launch parameters, just as you would using shortcuts. Some of these can be system-wide, others – custom to the app. Fortunately, everything.exe has a built-in parameters (lots), one of which is -startup, which does exactly what I wanted.
The app would start... but UAC would still appear
The second issue is slightly more baffling... at least if you are being as silly as I was. OnceI fixed the problem above, I immediately decided to restart my machine and see if it worked as intended (which by the way was also kind of stupid, since I could have simply shut down everything.exe and then fired the scheduler task manually). And yes, UAC still appeared.
It took me about 10 minutes of settings-browsing until I realized I missed one important detail.
The app was still in the system autostart.
So while I successfully overrode UAC, Windows still tried to launch it for the second time, and that triggered UAC.
All it took was to disable autostart for that app, and done.