Has anyone been successful at launching an instance of Windows Explorer in the SYSTEM account on Windows Vista or 7? It is possible to do this on XP, but I haven't been able to get it to completely work in Vista or 7.
Trying to launch Explorer as SYSTEM into session 1 (my user session) results in Explorer exiting immediately and returning an error code of 1.
I can launch Explorer as SYSTEM into session 0 with the following command:
psexec -i 0 -s explorer
That will create an instance of explorer running as SYSTEM with a taskbar and start menu on the hidden session 0 desktop, but won't let you open a file browser window. If you switch to the hidden session 0 desktop and try to open an Explorer window from there to browse files, the following error message appears:
"The server process could not be started because the configured identity is incorrect. Check the username and password."
I have set the following registry key to 1 for my user account and the SYSTEM account:
\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\SeparateProcess
There has got to be a way to make this work? If it is not possible, can anyone explain why?
-Rob