It’s not uncommon for a user to ask for help on their home computers when I visit customer sites and unless I having a really bad day I like to offer some help.

So I had one unhappy lady who bought a Sony Laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium.

The problem was nothing happened when she clicked on any file that windows media player would deal with example: .wmv or .mp3.

She was so frustrated she actually went home to bring the laptop to me.

Well Dr.DiPonio was on the case:

As the user described nothing happened when you ran either Windows Media Player 11 or a video /audio clip. The programme associations were correct.

My first instinct that UAC (User Account Control was involved).

When I right clicked Windows Media Player 11 and chose run as administrator it ran like it should. However an elevation prompt appeared but once clicked the application was all fine and dandy.

The users profile was an Administrator account but without a password. So we put a password on the account and rebooted, still no joy.

Next was to turn off UAC and bingo the problem went with it.

So for whatever reason the UAC wasn’t reaching elevation and just stopped. WMplayer.exe was not present on the task manager.

So in the few moments I had to help the user disabling UAC was the only solution I could come up with.

Naturally disabling UAC isn’t the best solution for security.

I think stuck between a Rock and hard place best describes the situation.

If anyone knows of a better work around or solution, leave a comment.