Active Directory 'Run As' Problem

Active Directory Users and Computers - 'Run As' not working

I recently had to move to using two different domain accounts at work. This was to downgrade the login account I use to a simple user, and keep a separate admin account for when I need it.

As you can imagine this has been a bit of an adjustment from running as a domain admin all the time. Still security is a priority so what the hell.

My normal way of getting around this inconvenience is to use the "Run As" option when starting a program. That way I can run a program as the domain admin account when I need to. That was working well until I tried to use the

Active Directory Users and Computers

mmc snap-in that comes with the Windows Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack.

The shortcut for this snap-in resides in the Administrative Tools section of my start menu. Viewing the Advanced properties of this shortcut showed that the checkbox

Run with different credentials

was greyed out. The other option was to hold down the shift key and right click the shortcut to get the "Run As" option. That seemed to work but after providing my account details the app failed to launch.

In the end the solution was to create my own shortcut to the c:\windows\system32\dsa.msc file. That seemed to work OK.

I'm not sure if this was due to my upgrading the Admin Tools Pack or it was due to a Windows XP security update but it was frustrating for a while.

p.s. I know this was done by Microsoft for a reason and you shouldn't really use "Run As" with these tools. The best option would be to give my simple user account the basic rights it would need to use Active Directories. Unfortunately that is not possible with the current set up at work.