Monday, September 27, 2010

Network drives unavailable while running programs under Admin privileges

Since the installation of VS 2010 I discovered that some network shares are unavailable to access with Visual Studio 2010. This is disturbing because my shared settings living on a network share.
I guessed this was caused because of VS2010
%VSINSTALLDIR%\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe
is treated to be executed as administrator also the VSLauncer.exe located in
%CommonProgramFiles%\microsoft shared\MSEnv\VSLauncher.exe
Yesterday I spent now 2 min with google and found a solution.
The problem is caused by using different access tokens for user currently logged in and program that runs with admin privileges. Further information can be found here.
This problem can be solved by enable sharing of access tokens between current (filtered) and admin access. This can be done by creating registry key
EnableLinkedConnections
located under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
and setting it’s DWORD value to ‘1’. Detailed information can be found here.

Have fun.