I'm an administrator on my Windows 11 PC, but whenever I try to launch anything with elevated privileges—such as Task Manager, Command Prompt, PowerShell, or Event Viewer—I immediately get "An administrator has blocked you from running this app." There's no UAC approval prompt; the program simply closes. Regular, non-elevated applications work normally.
I've checked Group Policy, the registry, AppLocker, IFEO entries using Autoruns, the AppInfo service, and remnants of Avast, but nothing suspicious stood out. System File Checker reported 462 corrupted files, although none appeared to involve the affected tools. ESET also quarantined a suspicious executable that had never been run, but removing it and rebooting made no difference.
The especially strange part is that even reading the Application and System event logs with wevtutil returns "Access denied." The system is running Windows 11 version 25H02, build 26200.9445. Has anyone encountered this kind of complete administrator-access failure?
1 Answer
One possibility is a kernel-level game anti-cheat driver or another security driver interfering with elevation. These drivers run below normal administrator permissions and can sometimes cause unusual access-denied behavior. Check installed services and drivers for anti-cheat software, temporarily remove or disable anything unnecessary, then reboot and test again. Easy Anti-Cheat is worth checking, although it may not be the cause by itself. Since SFC found a large number of corrupt files, also consider testing from Safe Mode or using a repair install if the driver checks don’t reveal anything.
I do have Easy Anti-Cheat installed for Elden Ring, but I haven’t been playing much lately and don’t have other games that use kernel-level anti-cheat. I’ll still check whether its service or driver is active.