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Windows XP RunAs feature is horribly broken

Switching back to Windows XP from the Mac has been educational. Along with learning a lot more about Cygin than I had ever known before, I’m discovering new features-to-be-avoided in Windows XP. Here is a biggie: “Run As”.

Windows allows you to execute programs with another user’s credentials. You are probability thinking “Simple right?”. Well, it isn’t. Using this feature seems to consistently corrupt the RunAs-ed user’s profile. Corrupted profiles seem to be a mysterious thing with little to no way to fix them; creating a new profile is basically the only solution. In my case I restored from a nightly backup (because I know stuff like this is bound to happen on Windows). My takeaway:

Disable RunAs on Windows!

Here is how.

2 Comments

  1. Alexey wrote:

    Hi Grant. I’m glad you enjoy your brand new WinXP. Btw, do you know, Red Hat is going to switch to 2.4 kernel (as for me I’d stay with 2.2.14 for a while).

    ;)

    Wednesday, March 10, 2010 at 4:44 am | Permalink
  2. Grant wrote:

    Hey Alexey,

    I know isn’t it great!

    2001 is bringing so many great features to us… oh wait :).

    Best wishes,

    Grant

    Wednesday, March 10, 2010 at 7:21 am | Permalink

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