Server 2008 R2 is ignoring my application manifest (?)

Question

I have a 32-bit application I'm working on that targets .NET 3.5; VS2010 is my development tool. My app requires elevated privileges for a variety of things, so I have an application manifest for it that has the following line in it:

<requestedExecutionLevel level="requireAdministrator" uiAccess="false" />

Because it's the right thing to do, I also have the lines in the manifest that indicate the application is compatible with Windows 7 and Windows Vista:

<!--The ID below indicates application support for Windows Vista -->
<supportedOS Id="{e2011457-1546-43c5-a5fe-008deee3d3f0}"/>
<!--The ID below indicates application support for Windows 7 -->
<supportedOS Id="{35138b9a-5d96-4fbd-8e2d-a2440225f93a}"/>

The app runs great on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. It immediately pops up the UAC prompt, it does not get affected by registry virtualization, etc. The manifest is clearly working there.

However, on 2008 R2 none of these things are true. UAC prompt does not appear. Registry virtualization happens (my primary problem). It's like it's completely ignoring my application manifest. I have no idea where to look or what to check. I have run the exact same bits on 7, Vista, and 2008 R2 and get exactly the same results every time. My 2008 R2 install is completely vanilla, as it's just a freshly-installed VM for testing.

Also, I'm fairly sure that Server 2008 is acting just like 2008 R2, basically ignoring the manifest. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

I have figured out the strange answer to my own question, though it comes in two parts:

• For some reason, I'm not getting a UAC prompt in either 2008 or 2008 R2, but in both cases the app is getting properly elevated and application virtualization is disabled correctly.

• My app, being 32-bit, was writing into the Wow6432Node registry key, hence I thought virtualization was happening because my changes weren't appearing. If I had tested on 2008 x86, which I had not, I would have found that the changes were appearing there but not in the x64 OSs.

Answer 2

Server 2008 R2 has UAC turned off by default. If it's turned off, then users from Administrators group have full admin rights and non-admin users do not have them and can't be elevated into an administrator account.