Windows – write data to on Windows Vista using any account and be viewable from all other accounts

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.

EDIT: Arr, sorry, I skimmed your post a little too fast, looks like this is a non-issue!

Have you looked where the written files are actually going?

Vista has a feature where files written into Program Files folders by applications get redirected to a local per user store. This store is located at %userprofile%\AppData\Local\VirtualStore

This is to allow legacy applications which wrote per user settings to Program Files to still operate correctly, also allowing multiple users to use the program without conflict.

There's a button in explorer called 'Compatibility Files' which will take you to this user store.. perhaps your writes are ending up there?

I'm not sure why you cant write to the subdirectory though. Security permissions?