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Creating Custom Application Compatibility Shims

In a recent article I wrote about the Standard User Analyzer, one of the tools available to mitigate app compat issues with UAC. Some applications require a little more work to get them working and for these situations you can use the Compatibility Administrator which part of the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.0. Again it is a pretty straight-forward tool to use once you have collected the required information. Now before you begin you need to use tools like Process Monitor to determine what is preventing the application from loading and operating properly. Once you have done that you can use the Compatibility Administrator to create the shim.

Before you get started I’d suggest looking at the existing database within the tool as there are already a large number of shims created and more being added. With that in mind launch the tool and click File –> New Database.

Enter a name for the program as well as the path to the executable and continue through the wizard.

There are a number of options you can set such as Operating System Mode and so UI mitigations. Some of these may look familiar as a few of these options can be set in the properties of the executable but there are many more options here.

There are a number (currently 334) of compatibility fixes available and you can see the parameters for each to determine what settings the manage and simply check each you require.

You can also customize program identification. This is great for applications that work on a particular OS but for some reason the vendor looks for a particular OS when installing.