App-V 5 FAQ: How Do I Suppress UAC Prompts in Applications Delivered with App-V?

App-V 5 FAQ: How Do I Suppress UAC Prompts in Applications Delivered with App-V?

Some older applications (and perhaps even some newer applications) will prompt for elevation on Windows via User Account Control (UAC) - this might be a valid request for elevation, but in the case of many older applications it’s because they expect to run with administrative rights.

Virtualizing an application via App-V can help with older applications by virtualizing rights to protected locations in the file system; however an application may still trigger a UAC prompt. It is possible to suppress these prompts and force the application to run with standard user rights.

There are two primary methods for suppressing these UAC prompts:

  1. Creating an application compatibility shim using the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit
  2. Setting the __COMPAT_LAYER environment variable

There are two excellent resources on each of these methods: