By the way, silently failing if the UAC prompt is denied, is a real problem, as it’s possible to configure UAC settings to deny an UAC request automatically:
GPO setting: User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for standard users
If you set it to “No Prompt”, UAC requests will be automatically blocked. And with the actual behavior a user would get no feedback, that the operation failed!

Please check with .04:
http://dl.powerarchiver.com/2018/powarc180104.exe

There should be an error, but lets make sure it does not appear at wrong time.

As to the changes, it does nothing to actual extraction code/engine, it checks if it can write file, and if not, it starts compression/extraction from another/elevated version of powerarc.exe… where before it elevated specific existing thread, which did not work reliably with engines that use multiple threads.

Thanks!

Now I get error messages as expected.

thanks for your help Michael!

By the way, silently failing if the UAC prompt is denied, is a real problem, as it’s possible to configure UAC settings to deny an UAC request automatically:
GPO setting: User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for standard users
If you set it to “No Prompt”, UAC requests will be automatically blocked. And with the actual behavior a user would get no feedback, that the operation failed!

Please check with .04:
http://dl.powerarchiver.com/2018/powarc180104.exe

There should be an error, but lets make sure it does not appear at wrong time.

As to the changes, it does nothing to actual extraction code/engine, it checks if it can write file, and if not, it starts compression/extraction from another/elevated version of powerarc.exe… where before it elevated specific existing thread, which did not work reliably with engines that use multiple threads.

Thanks!

32bit: Shell extension:

• Adding two files to a new zip archive; user has no write access to the destination folder; UAC dialog was shown and confirmed; but the rights were not sufficient afterwards (Windows 10 Controlled Folder access blocked it): Instead of giving an error, PowerArchiver launched one process after another to create the archive; Not tested in x64 as my test Windows is to old (No Controlled Folder access)

32bit: Application:

• Convert archive PA -> Other: TAR; Exception TList<System.Classes.TComponent> in module POWERARC.EXE at 000B94E4; This works in x64

64bit: Application:

• Convert archive PA -> Other: RAR; Conversion is done, but a message is displayed, that some archives couldn’t be converted (RAR executable 5.50 x64); Not tested on x86 since no RAR executable there…

Test scenario:
Test archives containing two files, try to extract to a folder, which is read only for users, administrators have full access. Passed means: UAC prompt confirmed --> asked to overwrite files --> no error displayed
Actually, there seems to be no error if I deny UAC prompt

Shell Extension x64 Passed: 7z bh cab lzh pa rar tar.gz zip zpaq
Application x64 Passed: 7z bh cab lzh pa rar tar.gz zip zpaq
Shell Extension x86 Passed: 7z bh cab lzh pa rar tar.gz zip zpaq
Application x86 Passed: 7z bh cab lzh pa rar tar.gz zip zpaq

Failed: None

Is this version reasonable stable to be used on a production machine? Actually, from your description, it seems you changed a lot in the extraction processes.

It elevates complete PowerArchiver instead of the thread, since 7z/PA formats use multiple threads. This might create some issues so test it out both in main and shell please!

thanks!

I’ll happily test the new version and get all the other features back.

as long as we can improve it… I will let you know, @ivan already spent few days on it alone. Thanks!

Sorry, but in favor of a working context menu, I’m switching back to PowerArchiver 2016, giving up the full x64 version, explorer mode and PA format.

actually we are just working on it… lets see what we can do, problem/difference is that in 2017 we have been using more threads for faster speed and that messes up UAC elevation in some cases.

@spwolf Any news here?

not yet… we have new building coming soon, let see if we can squeeze it in. For 2019 we will likely rewrite shell from scratch, we will see. Thanks for keeping track of it!

Can you estimate when the UAC problems will be fixed?
I like the new features of PA2018 very much, but I’m using the shell extension pretty often, so this is very disturbing.

I will raise this again at next build discussions… for upcoming week we have PACL, PAOP builds first and then we will look at PA again. Thanks!