When I started messing around with Vista one thing I noticed right off the bat is that when you hold the shift key and right click on an application you would get the option to ‘Run As’ a different user. A very useful feature when dealing with user accounts who have limited rights and you need to install programs using elevated rights. IT staff that work in corporate domain environments may use this feature often.

In Vista this option is completely gone… That’s when Sysinternals comes to the rescue with a very handy tool called ShellRunas. Download the code directly here.

Once you have downloaded the zip file, unzip it and place it in a directory. Then open a command prompt and navigate to the directory where you placed ShellRunas.exe and then run the following line:

shellrunas.exe /reg /regnetonly

After that when you right click on a program or shortcut you should get two additional options:

• Run as different user (netonly)

• Run as different user

The netonly option is for running applications with a user account that is not local to the machine that you are using, for example a domain administrator account.