Windows – write data that can be viewed and modified by all users in Windows Vista

As of 2017, an easy method to achieve this is the following:

import ctypes, sys

def is_admin():
    try:
        return ctypes.windll.shell32.IsUserAnAdmin()
    except:
        return False

if is_admin():
    # Code of your program here
else:
    # Re-run the program with admin rights
    ctypes.windll.shell32.ShellExecuteW(None, "runas", sys.executable, " ".join(sys.argv), None, 1)

If you are using Python 2.x, then you should replace the last line for:

ctypes.windll.shell32.ShellExecuteW(None, u"runas", unicode(sys.executable), unicode(" ".join(sys.argv)), None, 1)

Also note that if you converted you python script into an executable file (using tools like py2exe, cx_freeze, pyinstaller) then you should use sys.argv[1:] instead of sys.argv in the fourth parameter.

Some of the advantages here are:

• No external libraries required. It only uses ctypes and sys from standard library.
• Works on both Python 2 and Python 3.
• There is no need to modify the file resources nor creating a manifest file.
• If you don't add code below if/else statement, the code won't ever be executed twice.
• You can get the return value of the API call in the last line and take an action if it fails (code <= 32). Check possible return values here.
• You can change the display method of the spawned process modifying the sixth parameter.

Documentation for the underlying ShellExecute call is here.

During install time you can write it to your program's install folder, since presumably it won't change (require write access) later. You should still have read access there as a standard user. Otherwise, how would run the program? :)

Or you can use the All Users Application Data folder. In XP, that would normally map to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\YourApp\. I don't have Vista in front of me, so I can't give you the exact location at the moment, but it should be a pretty simple mapping.