Drag and Drop while running as admin

Hi all, Win 11 22H2.

I've found that I can drag and drop without issue into any application unless I'm running that application as admin. UAC is disabled. I've tried a few of the workarounds I've found while searching but not resolve the issue other than not running the apps as admin.

This is by no means a show-stopper; more of a curiosity. It'd be great if there was a workable solution but if there isn't, I can just launch apps without running as admin.

Thanks in advance!

What you are witnessing is the protection of one user account against intrusion by another user account.

As far as workarounds go, you should be able to copy things from other non-Admin applications & paste them into the Admin application. That does not breach any rules because the Admin application is being instructed directly to carry out the paste operation.

And I've managed to write this entire post without mentioning UAC let alone nagging you about having disabled it.


Denis

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Right after 22H2 was released, many users reported disabling UAC and running as Admin killed drag & drop for the Desktop and Windows Apps. Countless bug reports have been filed, but the short answer is it's broken unless MS decides to fix it.

Just one of many GitHub comments:

zadjii-msft commented on Jan 6, 2022
MSFT:35616520 has more context here. Looks like this is going to be an unfortunate "no" for now. We may need to move to a future version of WinAppSDK that might support this, whenever support for elevated drag/drop is added to WASDK.

Click to expand...

If you're on 21H2, the old behavior will continue working for you.

I think I must have misunderstood the point of this thread.

If I drag & drop from a standard-running application into an Admin-running application then the drag & drop will fail.
For example, I dragged the TestFolder from File explorer into both Admin & standard Command prompt windows.
The operation works for the standard prompt but not for the Admin one.

The behaviour is the same whether UAC is on or off.
The behaviour has been this way since 2009 if not earlier.

I thought that was what this thread was about.
What have I misunderstood?


Denis

Try3 said:

I think I must have misunderstood the point of this thread.

If I drag & drop from a standard-running application into an Admin-running application then the drag & drop will fail.
For example, I dragged the TestFolder from File explorer into both Admin & standard Command prompt windows.
The operation works for the standard prompt but not for the Admin one.
View attachment 66850
The behaviour is the same whether UAC is on or off.
The behaviour has been this way since 2009 if not earlier.

I thought that was what this thread was about.
What have I misunderstood?


Denis

Click to expand...

Hi Denis, thanks for the response. I'll admit I've never tried dragging and dropping into an app running as admin until now. So, with it being expected behavior since 2009 or before, I guess that's the norm. Thanks for the info!

garlin said:

Right after 22H2 was released, many users reported disabling UAC and running as Admin killed drag & drop for the Desktop and Windows Apps. Countless bug reports have been filed, but the short answer is it's broken unless MS decides to fix it.

Just one of many GitHub comments:


If you're on 21H2, the old behavior will continue working for you.

Click to expand...

Good to know, thank you. What caused me to stumble upon this was an issue stemming from the update. An image editor I use began crashing after I rotated an image and then tried to do something else, such as adding text. I found that if I run the program as admin, it no longer crashes but I cannot drag and drop. Not a big deal, just something I stumbled onto and thought I'd do some looking around. Thanks for the info.