UAC screen dimming a PITA...Win7 to the rescue.

D

Dk975

Gawd
Joined
Sep 24, 2005
Messages
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I notice that when I had video overlay apps running, TV tuner software and MPC-HC, and when I opened an app that evoked UAC screen dimming (CPU-Z, GPU-Z, Everest, CoreTemp, etc...) Aero would shut off. When you click on the Popup, it would blame the video app for it. Thankfully in W7, this can be avoided by sliding UAC to the third lowest position where it says disable screen dimming. It's a PITA anyway, all I need is the box to pop up. Hooray for 7 :D
 
It's part of the WDDM 1.1 driver abilities. They discuss this (or wrote about it) on one of the Windows 7 development team blogs, I guess it's a "nice" thing to have, but personally anything that stops the user and grabs their attention is a good thing, even if some folks consider it a PITA. :D
 
You can disable the dimming in Vista as well, either with secpol.msc or a registry hack.
 
The dimming isn't primarily there as a graphical feature, but rather because UAC popups appear on the Secure Desktop (also used for login and Windows Security), a separate session which only SYSTEM processes can interact with, preventing spoofing or other exploits involving the elevation dialog. Since your programs are not running on the Secure Desktop, there's a static dimmed picture of the normal desktop behind the dialog, and as Aero can only run on one session at a time, the prompt does not use Aero itself. I guess the behaviour you describe is caused by a bug somewhere along the line, so turning off Secure Desktop is a workaround.

As devil22 said, you can also disable use of the Secure Desktop on Vista (but it is, well, less secure).
 
I never had UAC on XP, and everything was fine, so I will keep it at the reduced UAC in Windows 7, and maybe try the tip on my Vista laptop.
 
Technically, if you didn't have UAC on XP, you have no way of knowing that everything was fine. UAC can prevent rootkits. XP can't.
 
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