Vista: Disable UAC for select applications

Microsoft has released a Knowledgebase article that explains how users can disable UAC, that is the User Account Control, for select applications in Windows Vista.

This solution requires an administrator account and the Application Compatibility Toolkit which can be downloaded from Microsoft directly.

The advantage of this solution is that you can disable the User Account Control for selected applications only while keeping it enabled for most programs.

This is for instance useful if you use an application day in day out but get UAC prompts whenever you fire it up. This can be annoying especially if you trust the program and don't think Windows should display the prompt each time as you accept it anyway.

The following process has to be run only once but it takes some time, here are the steps:

1. Download and install the Application Compatibility Toolkit.
2. In the Start menu, locate the new folder of the Application Compatibility Toolkit.
3. Find the shortcut for Compatibility Administrator.
4. Right click it and click Run as administrator.
5. In the left hand pane, right-click on the database under Custom Databases and select Create New, and then Application Fix.
6. Enter a name and other details of the application you want to alter behavior on and then browse to it to select it. Click Next.
7. Click Next until you are in the Compatibility Fixes screen.
8. On the Compatibility Fixes screen, find the item RunAsInvoker, and check it.
9. Click Next and then Finish.
10. Select File and Save As. Save the file as a filename.SDB type file in a directory you will easily find it.
11. Copy the .sdb file to the Vista computer you want to alter the elevation prompt behavior on.
12. Click Start>All Programs>Accessories. Right click Command Prompt and click Run as administrator.
13. Run the command below: sdbinst \.sdb
14. For example, if you saved the .SDB file as abc.sdb in the c:\Windows folder, the command should be this: sdbinst c:\windows\abc.sdb
15. It should prompt: Installation of complete.

If everything went fine, Windows Vista should not display an UAC prompt anymore for the program.