Run as Admin disables drag and drop

[WILLYumAZN]

I noticed a few months ago that using iTunes, drag and drop is disabled when I run the program as an administrator. (Side inquiry, why should we have to run things as admin even though we're the admin?) Running iTunes as a normal user lets me drag and drop. Similar is observed with Photoshop and Premiere Pro, along with VLC and Notepad, basically everything.

 

Why should admin status disable the convenient drag-and-drop feature?

Security? Bug? Sweg?

[colonel_mortis]

The reason you have to run stuff as admin is because in ye olde dayes of XP and earlier, everything run on the admin account ran as admin. Including malware. If the malware is set up correctly and run as admin, it can do anything to your PC (including but not limited to preventing its own termination, terminating the antivirus, and deleting everything, potentially including system32). Doesn't sound very good, does it? So now you have to manually tell it to run as admin and give it permission (and the screen dims to prevent malware faking clicks to give itself admin rights).

 

As for your problem, it could be that the program you are dragging from/to isn't running as admin. It needs to be running as admin to get data from other processes running as admin, presumably to reduce the potential effect of malware further. You can see this restriction in action if you use displayfusion to allow the mouse wheel to scroll the window under the mouse - it only works on programs not running as admin. There's not much you can do, so you're going to have to use alternative ways of moving your files, or not run it as admin. Out of interest, why do you need to run as admin anyway?

[WILLYumAZN]

The reason you have to run stuff as admin is because in ye olde dayes of XP and earlier, everything run on the admin account ran as admin. Including malware. If the malware is set up correctly and run as admin, it can do anything to your PC (including but not limited to preventing its own termination, terminating the antivirus, and deleting everything, potentially including system32). Doesn't sound very good, does it? So now you have to manually tell it to run as admin and give it permission (and the screen dims to prevent malware faking clicks to give itself admin rights).

 

As for your problem, it could be that the program you are dragging from/to isn't running as admin. It needs to be running as admin to get data from other processes running as admin, presumably to reduce the potential effect of malware further. You can see this restriction in action if you use displayfusion to allow the mouse wheel to scroll the window under the mouse - it only works on programs not running as admin. There's not much you can do, so you're going to have to use alternative ways of moving your files, or not run it as admin. Out of interest, why do you need to run as admin anyway?

I looked into it more and it's a part of UAC and windows sending messages to other windows, for security.

I'm actually not sure why I need to run as admin, I just do. It's almost impulsive to run programs elevated.

[neon]

Don't run stuff as Admin if it's not needed, you are gaining no functionality by dong so (for almost all programs) yet you are loosing functionality by doing so, and is it not a pain to right click and select the Run as Admin option everytime you start a program rather than just selecting the program as normal.