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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T22:19:55+00:00

Is it possible to run handle.exe (from sysinternals) from a service (in windows7) without

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Is it possible to run handle.exe (from sysinternals) from a service (in windows7) without having to turn off UAC?

The service is a custom c-app that needs to find out which process is locking a file it tries to access and handle.exe seems to be a good way to solve it but i can’t get it to work with UAC turned on. This app runs all the time so i can’t have a UAC prompt while its running but its fine if it shows up at startup.

Handle.exe works fine from an admin commandprompt but fails when trying to run from a normal prompt.

I call handle.exe from CreateProcess() and get the output from pipes. I guess there should be a way to solve this but i can’t figure it out. Setting up the service to log in from an admin account does not seem to work.

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  1. Editorial Team

    UAC does not affect services (it only affects interactive sessions) so that should work.

    However, if you don’t want to move your entire program into a service then there are better ways to do this which don’t require creating, installing and managing a separate service process in addition to your main program.

    1. If your program requires admin rights to work at all, and this isn’t the only place it will require them, then you could flag your program (via its embedded manifest resource) as requiring administrator rights. It will then trigger one UAC prompt whenever it is run and be run with full admin rights, including the ability to run Handle.exe.

    2. On the other hand, if this is the only place where your program needs admin rights, it may make sense to create a COM DLL which wraps your Handle.exe call (or any other admin work) so that you can use UAC to make elevated calls to that function from your non-elevated app. You will then trigger a UAC prompt each time you create (an elevated version of) that COM object. You can keep the COM object open as long as you want, and create it whenever you want, so when and how often the UAC prompt(s) appear are still up to you.

    Both 1 & 2 are standard uses of UAC so any good documentation or tutorial on UAC will describe how to do them in detail.

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