Annoying UAC Prompts in Windows 11 After Upgrade

After an upgrade from W10 to W11, the UAC prompts pop up at almost every change my programs make. It doesn't matter if they're trusted, if I'm running them as an administrator, or if I've said yes to the prompt before. The Windows user is a full rights administrator. The most common example of this is the Battle.net games launcher, which will cause the prompt when launching and then intermittently every hour or so every time it makes any changes. Obviously this is very annoying when it happens in the middle of games or movies.

Did the sensitivity of this system change from W10 to W11? I did not have the UAC settings slider set down to 'Never notify' on my previous install, but programs would only ask for the prompt when launching them and not as they ran. Additionally, despite the slider currently being set to the second lowest option which states 'Don't notify me when I make changes to Windows settings' that's exactly what I seem to get notified about. If I change any Windows settings, the prompt still appears. What's going on here and can it be solved in a way that doesn't include disabling the prompts entirely?

Personally, I see no good reason, security-wise, to have it enabled. It provides no real useful information to help you decide whether to trust a program or not.

I have no experience with games causing UAC prompts, but I know that any program situated in the folders on the system disk "Program Files" and "Program Files (x86)" that try to write to a file in one of those folders, will cause a UAC prompt. Reason is that modern programs for Win11 are supposed to write data / settings either to the user Appdata folder or to the ProgramData folder.

So I have the habit of installing programs, that are writing data to their own installed folder, to a separate folder, which in my system I called "Program Files Portable". But of course any name for that is usable.

And may be in the app you use for the game you can change the settings so that data are written in some other place. Then choose some logical location, not being in the 'Program Files" or "Program files (x64)" folders.

Try different user account to find out if problem resolves.

FreeBooter said:

Try different user account to find out if problem resolves.

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I only have this one. Should I create another one specifically to test this?

ussis6nad said:

I only have this one. Should I create another one specifically to test this?

Click to expand...

Yes create a new user account to see problem resolves.

Have you tried running sfc /scannow from an elevated command prompt to make sure there are no corrupt system files?

FreeBooter said:

Yes create a new user account to see problem resolves.

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The issue remains, now on both accounts.

Marcus Vinicus said:

Have you tried running sfc /scannow from an elevated command prompt to make sure there are no corrupt system files?

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The scan found corrupt files and repaired them. However, the CBS.log entry only mentions bthmodem.sys as a culprit, which is probably not related to the UAC prompts.

The only other suggestion I have is to run a full AV scan on the PC to make sure that there isn't any malware etc? I guess you've probably done this by now.

Good luck!

Marcus Vinicus said:

The only other suggestion I have is to run a full AV scan on the PC to make sure that there isn't any malware etc? I guess you've probably done this by now.

Good luck!

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Correct, I have weekly full scans and daily quick scans set up that have picked up nothing. This issue seems to have started right after upgrading as well, so I doubt it's malware related. I appreciate the help though.

Re Battle.net I saw this post on the Blizzard forums. Is this similar or the same issue as yours?
There is a post there from October 2022 (2nd to last on the page) where a Windows 11 user stopped the UAC prompts popping up.