Run application with admin rights

Question

Hello,

I'm a network administrator and I'm having issues with an external application. Although running the application doesn't require local admin rights, the software does an automatic check for updates when it's launched. There are updates about once a week. If the application is launched without admin rights, the software doesn't do the check. Our users don't have local admin rights. The result is that the application gets outdated and an administrator has to log on in order to update it.

Here are the solutions I've tried so far:

1. I ran the application using the runas command, which works, but isn't practical as an administrator would have to provide the password every time.
2. Modified the compatibility of the application to "R un as administrator". I disabled UAC to get this to work, but the user still needs to provide a password. I could create a locked-down user that can't log onto any machine, etc, etc, but this seems like a silly solution. I might as well give admin rights everywhere.
3. Doing some more research, I tried using RunAsSpc (http://www.robotronic.de/runasspcEn.html). This appeared to work well and did exactly what I'm looking for, but created two issues: no mapped drives, and an access violation when printing which I'm not going to bother troubleshooting.

I've had to grant all users local admin rights until I find a solution. Is there any way to allow the application to do its updates without granting full admin rights to the whole system? Any recommendations?

Answer 1

Yeah, tell the program vendor to build their program intelligently.  There's not going to be a solution to this.

Otherwise, you'll have to just have someone that does have admin rights login once a week and install any required updates.  Sort of like updating Microsoft Office (requires an administrator to do it).