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Application Compatibility with the Standard User Analyzer

One of the biggest blockers to deployment in application compatibility. Whether it is a new OS and existing applications or new applications on an existing OS these are they kind of things that drive you nuts. There are many tools available now to help address these issues, one being the Standard User Analyzer. With Windows Vista one of the app compat issues that arises is due to User Account Control (UAC). With this you have two options, disable UAC (which is the worst thing you can do) or use SUA to test the application, detect issues and create shims to mitigate the issues.

“The Standard User Analyzer (SUA) tool enables you to test your applications to detect potential compatibility issues due to the User Account Control (UAC) feature in the Windows Vista® operating system.”

Let’s look at an example of this tool in action with a demo app called Stock Viewer. When I try to click on the Trends button I get an error when running as a Standard User on Windows Vista.

The SUA tool is simple enough to use and to start we’ll launch it from the desktop icon and then enter the path to the Stock Viewer application.

We can then click Launch and use the application, in this case we’ll click on the Trends button again. SUA will launch the application and you will get prompted to enter admin credentials to elevate the process at which time SUA will start collection information on what and where the application is accessing.

Once complete you can close the Stock Viewer application and flip through the tabs in SUA to see what the tool has found.

The last step is to click on the Mitigation tab and choose to Apply Mitigations. At this point you can test the application again and if all is good you can then Export Mitigations as MSI and deploy that to the systems in your organization.