UAC turned off --> by itself

[BehindEnemyLines]

Leading to the symptoms:

1. Laptop failed to enter hibernation (stuck at black screen), turned off using power button.
2. Rebooted and selected normal startup.

3. Got stuck at a black screen after entering my password for about 2 minutes. I basically brought up the Task Manager using CTRL+ALT+DEL and tried to start explorer.exe, which didn't work.

4. Desktop finally showed and programs started as normal.
5. Now, UAC is disabled since I was able to run anything without a single prompt.
6. Notice that Protected Mode in IE7 is also OFF.
7. A restart would restart UAC (I am pretty sure of this).
8. No idea why.

UAC turned itself off (even better screenshot)

I hope this isn't some bug, because it would be a terrible security loophole. This has happened once before roughly 2 months ago, but this installation of Vista is new just three weeks ago.

I can pretty much do anything right now like XP with full admin rights without UAC prompting even though everything seems to be enabled.

 

[thegorx]

Maybe somehow by launching the explorer thru the taskmanager then the explorer loading the shell it loaded it in Admin mode. I may be way off but I thought I read a tip somewhere about running the explorer as Admin bypassing UAC.

 

[BehindEnemyLines]

You may be getting somewhere. When you launch a task with Task Manager, it has a caution: "This task will be created with administrative privileges." But since it happened so quickly, and if my memory serves me correctly, the UAC did prompt (just maybe). But nothing seemed to happen after clicking Continue, so I thought it didn't work.

But does running explorer.exe in admin mode cause the entire UAC to be off?

I tried running Firefox using the "Run as administrator," and it did without a prompt.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: BehindEnemyLines
You may be getting somewhere. When you launch a task with Task Manager, it has a caution: "This task will be created with administrative privileges." But since it happened so quickly, and if my memory serves me correctly, the UAC did prompt (just maybe). But nothing seemed to happen after clicking Continue, so I thought it didn't work.

But does running explorer.exe in admin mode cause the entire UAC to be off?

I tried running Firefox using the "Run as administrator," and it did without a prompt.

Yes, an app running in admin mode launches other apps in the same mode.