On-screen keyboard will only load for administrators

Question

Hi, I'm having a problem with Windows 10 v1607. When attempting to launch the on-screen keyboard as a standard user, it fails and provides a dialog box with a red X "Could not start On-Screen Keyboard." and "OK" button. Sometimes the failed launch also provides a windows application crash dialog window "Accessibility On-Screen Keyboard has stopped working...." which then presents the user to close the application. This happens for all standard users. If an administrator logs in, then opening the on-screen keyboard works. Further, anyone can open the on-screen keyboard at the user logging screen by using the accessibility options button from the lower right. Once the user is logged in, the on-screen keyboard closes and if the user is not an administrator they cannot re-open the keyboard.

The event log indicates that the app crash is failing with some issue related to DUI70.dll.

Fault bucket , type 0
Event Name: APPCRASH
Response: Not available
Cab Id: 0

Problem signature:
P1: osk.exe
P2: 10.0.14393.0
P3: 57899a8f
P4: DUI70.dll
P5: 10.0.14393.0
P6: 57899863
P7: c0000005
P8: 00000000000296c2
P9:
P10:

Attached files:

These files may be available here:
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportQueue\AppCrash_osk.exe_aad2c1d5e24e3695df165c1d159b0400b0c7c6_371a8790_36ff0186

Analysis symbol:
Rechecking for solution: 0
Report Id: 119e12c0-6dde-4ca0-ac58-be8ec9184b8b
Report Status: 4102
Hashed bucket:

I have tried various UAC settings and verified the folder permissions for both the osk.exe and the system32 folder have read and execute permissions for standard users.

The exact same group policy setup is currently working on another laptop which is Win 10 v2004 and a very similar group policy setup on a Server 2016 VM v1607.

It's obviously a permissions issue somewhere since the application works just fine as an administrator. What permission setting am I missing?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Hi.
Have you always been only able to load the on-screen keyboard as an administrator or has this problem happened recently?
Has the computer been updated recently?
If this issue occurs after PC update, there may be a conflict between on-screen keyboard and the patch.

Answer 2

I found the cause. Turns out this was UAC after all. I found I had 3 GPOs which were affecting the security setting: User Account Control: Run all administrators in Admin Approval Mode. I found that if this setting is set to Enabled that this is a value of "1" on Registry Key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\EnableLUA.

Specifically for Win10 v1607, if this value is set to "1" then the on-screen keyboard works for non-administrator users. If this is set to "0", the error occurs. This seems to occur even with the latest KB patches available as of December 2022 for v1607.

Noteworthy: other versions of Win10 such as v2004 do not exhibit this situation. Likewise, Server 2016 v1607 also does not exhibit this.