I have encountered the same problem in win7. I am a Chinese user and found the cause and solved it by searching in Chinese forums.
Its cause is some buggy(maybe programmed old-fashionedly) softwares that add extra entries in the right-click context menu, with a DLL as the context menu handler.
Possible causing softwares includes:
NamiRobot (http://www.namipan.com/);
old version Tencent RTX (http://rtx.tencent.com/)
You can check your right-click context menu and see if there are any strange items that do not belong to Windows 7. In my case it is the NamiRobot that adds one item in the context menu for all file types.
I also have these context menu items and they are fine:
Adobe PDF;
WinRAR;
Kaspersky;
WinHex;
UltraEdit;
EmEditor;
UltraISO.
There are rumors that Sony DVD software also causes this problem, I don't know whether it is true.
So the solution is either to uninstall the software, or unregister the context menu handler DLL and remove the context menu entry.
For NamiRobot, I manually fixed in the following steps:
- open an elevated command prompt(start -> all programs ->
accessories -> command prompt, right
click -> run as admin)
- run the command: regsvr32 /u "C:\Program
Files\NamiRobot\Data\NamipanExt1.dll"
- run regedit.exe, delete the following keys:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\NamipanExt
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{5696473A-FC50-4CA7-B87A-AF60201B04DD}
The three steps are enough to fix the
problem. To prevent the software
screwing up the context menu again,
you may want to do the following:
First rename the original
NamipanExt1.dll to
"NamipanExt1.dll.bak", then create an
empty txt file in the same
directory(C:\Program
Files\NamiRobot\Data), finally rename
the txt file to "NamipanExt1.dll".
Hope you find your causing software and fix it!
UPDATE: other softwares causing this problem:
CompareIt(according to imasu49)
CopyPathEx(according to Peter, see below)
Best Answer
This is really a matter of learning what the security tokens are on Windows these days, but I'll copy/paste an answer from SO found here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8986971/what-precisely-does-run-as-administrator-do since it isn't possible to close as dupe cross-site.
When you log on Windows creates an access token. This identifies you, the groups you are a member of and your privileges. And note that whether a user is an administrator or not is determined by whether the user is a member of the Administrators group.
Without UAC, when you run a program it gets a copy of the access token, and this controls what the program can access.
With UAC, when you run a program it gets a restricted access token. The is the original access token with "Administrators" removed from the list of groups (and some other changes). Even though your user is a member of the Administrators group, the program can't use Administrator privileges.
When you select "Run as Administrator" and your user is an administrator the program is launched with the original unrestricted access token. If your user is not an administrator you are prompted for an administrator account, and the program is run under that account.
Credit to: arx
See here for more reading:
How User Account Control Works
User Account Control Documentation