WNetAddConnection2 in Windows 7 with Impersonation and no Error Code

Question

I'm doing some crazy impersonation stuff to get around UAC dialogs in Windows 7 so the user does not have to interact with the UI (I have the admin creds of course).

I have a process running as the Administrator and elevated past UAC. The issue that I'm facing is that when I make a call to WNetAddConnection2, within this process, I am not getting a new mapped net drive. The function returns ERROR_SUCCESS but no net drive is visible. We have another method of adding network drives using 'subst' but this, again, returns successful does does not add a net drive. I have tried to use the default user (which is the Administrator because of process's security context) and I have tried using specific user credentials. I can map the drive just fine through Explorer.

Of course the same functionality works fine in XP/2003. I haven't got around to testing on Vista because of issues with impersonation that are limiting my ability to spin up the process. Are there unique Windows 7 limits on this function? MSDN does not glean any that I can find.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

The issue was that the process was running as Administrator. Impersonation will not work because WNetAddConnection2 evaluates on processes user. You must start a separate process to accomplish this.