I share a love-hate relationship with Windows’ User Account Control (aka UAC). According to Microsoft, UAC is supposed to add an extra layer of security for system files, and therefore minimizing the damage malware can inflict on infected hosts. From a security standpoint, this is indeed very good, but unfortunately it can sometimes interfere with the way certain programs run.
Not too long ago, I decided to re-enable UAC on all my pc’s (I initially had it disabled because of the constant and annoying prompts!!) and came across a bug. Long story short, I had Anvir Task Manager running on one of my older laptops, but after enabling UAC, Anvir’s temperature monitor tray icon stopped working properly. It just would not show the temperature when Anvir was set to run on startup (on a manual start, everything works but I would have to confirm a UAC prompt). I eventually found that the reason this was happening was because Anvir needed to run with admin privileges in order to work properly. My guess is that Anvir’s method of checking the motherboard’s temperature requires elevated permissions to work. So we need a way of getting the program to run on startup, but with elevated privileges. Fortunately, there is a clever workaround to bypass UAC using Windows’ own Task Scheduler.
