Running Elevated/As Administrator

OpenKneeboard will not fully work as administrator; this includes known crash-causing bugs that can only be fixed by Microsoft.

This is not specific to OpenKneeboard - on modern Windows, running any application as administrator without a specific need is more likely to cause problems than fix them.

The only way to resolve these issues is not to run OpenKneeboard as administrator. If OpenKneeboard says [Administrator] but you are not intentionally running anything as administrator, check out the User Account Control section.

  1. Running Elevated/As Administrator
    1. Disable OpenKneeboard’s Automatic Elevation
    2. Shortcuts
    3. Other Launchers
    4. User Account Control

Disable OpenKneeboard’s Automatic Elevation

By default, OpenKneeboard will run as whatever user and with whatever elevation level it was started as; make sure this hasn’t changed, under Settings -> Advanced -> Compatibility quirks; “Elevation” should be set to “Run elevated if launched elevated”:

Elevation -> Run elevated if launched elevated

Shortcuts

If you are launching OpenKneeboard through a shortcut, make sure that “Run this progam as an administrator” is not checked in the shortcut’s compatibility settings:

Properties -> Compatibility -> Run this program as administrator

Other Launchers

If you are starting through another launcher which is running as administrator, the best solution is to make sure that the other launcher (and the game) is also not running as administrator; in some cases this is impossible.

For this case, you can try telling OpenKneeboard to automatically switch to running as a normal user, using Settings -> Advanced -> Compatibility quirks - set to ‘Run as normal user’:

Elevation -> Run as normal user

Some Windows settings and third-party programs are incompatible with this option; if OpenKneeboard is unable to start after changing this option:

  1. Open regedit
  2. Go to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Fred Emmott\OpenKneeboard
  3. Delete DesiredElevation from the right hand side:

screenshot of RegEdit - right click -> delete on DesiredElevation

User Account Control

Open the start menu and find ‘User Account Control’ (‘UAC’):

screenshot of start menu after typing 'UAC'

Set the slider on the left to anything except the bottom option (‘never notify’):

UAC with 'never notify' setting circled and crossed out

The “never notify” option is misleadingly labelled and has a much larger effect than it sounds: Windows will not just stop prompting you, it will automatically run more things as Administrator.

If you have no preference or are unsure, set it to the default option with the bold tick marks:

UAC with default option selected