Restore Administrative Unlock to Windows 7

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Ben Norcutt

Ben Norcutt is a Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP) with 13 years experience inIT administration in educational establishments.

Latest posts by Ben Norcutt (see all)

• Automate out-of-office messages in Outlook with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) - Fri, Jan 5 2018
• Add a signature to Office 365 emails with PowerShell - Mon, Nov 11 2013
• Restore Administrative Unlock to Windows 7 - Fri, Oct 4 2013

You might object that we have fast user switching. Very true, but that doesn’t log off the user which may be what you want to do to perform admin tasks on the local machine. You may also have a mix of machines some with fast user switching enabled and some without.

Administrative Unlock in Windows 7

I found a solution to the problem in the TechNet forum where Oliver Friewald created a DLL that allows you to restore Administrative Unlock in Windows 7. Follow the steps below to deploy the Administrative Unlock feature in your network through Group Policy.

Step 1 - Download Administrative Unlock DLL ^

Download the required files.

This is the author’s public skydrive and a huge thanks to him for producing this tool.

You only need the two AdministrativeUnlock.dll files in their respective x86 & x64 folders. Copy these folders to a network distribution share.

Step 2 - Create the Group Policy Object ^

Create a new Group Policy object and give it a descriptive name. I called mine “Install Administrative Unlock Feature.”

Administrative Unlock Feature Group Policy Object

Right click on the object, select edit and navigate to Computer Configuration> Preferences> Windows Settings> Files.

Click in the white space and choose File> New.

It should look like this when you are done:

File deployment with Group Policy Preferences

Source file is the UNC path to where you have stored the DLL files.

Destination File should be %systemroot%\system32\administrativeunlock.dll

There is a different DLL version for x86 and x64, so you will need to target your GPO either using item level targeting from the “common” tab as shown below, a WMI filter or any method of your choosing.

GPO item level targeting

Step 3 - Create the Registry entries ^

We also need to push some Registry entries out to the client machines and we’ll do that using Group Policy Preferences. We can use the same GPO as for the DLL.

Navigate to Computer Configuration> Preferences> Registry.

Right click in the white area and choose> New> Registry Item

There are four entries that need to be made.

Key 1

Action: Create

Hive: HKEY_LOCAL_Machine
Key Path: SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\Credential Providers\{B986C180-0798-4DF5-A611-A1991AA890B9}

Value Name: Click in Default checkbox

Value Type: REG_SZ

Value Data: AdministrativeUnlock

Key 2

Action: Create

HIVE: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT

Key Path: CLSID\{B986C180-0798-4DF5-A611-A1991AA890B9}

Value Name: Click in Default checkbox

Value Type: REG_SZ

Value Data: AdministrativeUnlock

Key 3

Action: Create

Hive: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT

Key Path: CLSID\{B986C180-0798-4DF5-A611-A1991AA890B9}\InprocServer32

Value Name: Click in Default checkbox

Value Type: REG_SZ

Value Data: AdministrativeUnlock.dll

Key 4

Action: Create

Hive: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT

Key Path: CLSID\{B986C180-0798-4DF5-A611-A1991AA890B9}\InprocServer32

Value Name: ThreadingModel

Value Type: REG_SZ

Value Data: Apartment

You Registry items should now look like this:

Registry entries for Administrative  Unlock

Step 4 - Apply the GPO ^

Now apply the GPO to a test machine or two. This can be done by replacing the “authenticated users” from the security filtering of the object with your test security group.

You can unlock the computer by clicking “Administrative Unlock” on the “Other Credentials” button. Then select “Administrative Unlock” and enter your admin credentials to log off the user.

Unlock Windows 7

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