I have a non-interactive service running as a the privileged SYSTEM user on Windows machines, and I need it to launch a given executable as an elevated process.
I have managed to launch a child process as SYSTEM, using WTSGetActiveConsoleSessionId(), finding a system process and duplicating it's token. Similarly, I can launch a non-elevated process as a regular user. But I need to launch the process as the regular user, but with elevated privileges - so that I don't have to show UAC, but the process is running as the appropriate user.
I am not trying to bypass UAC - since the user already agreed to installing the service. I am trying to mitigate an inconvenience. I have found a similar, unanswered question - but asked again in hope of maybe getting an answer.