Allowing Windows 7 Desktop Gadgets to run with UAC off

By mike

I have no idea how I missed this – I guess I keep my desktop too cluttered up with stuff to notice? I’ve been running Windows 7 since it was released as Beta and love it. Enough so that the next laptop most likely will be a PC? (gasp!) Anyhoo, I had disabled User Account Control in Windows 7 simply because I’ve honestly never run into an issue in the past on non-UAC-enabled Windows versions like XP – read: I have no problem running everything as administrator. But disabling UAC ended up closing all my gadgets. And I’ve liked gadgets in the past and I want them back. How do you do it? Via the registry, of course.

Fire up regedit and navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Sidebar \ Settings

Create a new DWORD (not a 64-bit QWORD) named AllowElevatedProcess. Set that value to 1 and close regedit. No need to reboot or anything. Go back to Control Panel, and gadgetize-away.

Take this all with a grain of salt, as there are those that view this issue as a major security flaw: Sacrificing security for usability: UAC security flaw in Windows 7 beta.