I struggled with an immensely annoying problem the other day when I simply couldn’t run Explorer.exe as another user. This was on a WinXP desktop which happened to have Internet Explorer 8 installed. It took me absolutely ages to find this answer posted by leereid, so I thought I’d share it with you.
If you’re running IE7 [or later] under WinXP, in order to run Windows Explorer with the runas command, it must be run as a separate process. There are a couple of ways to do this, but one that I recently found which is very slick is with the undocumented parameter /separate, like this:
runas /user:domain\username "explorer /separate"Oh, and if you’ve got a space in your username, enter it as:
/user:"domain\user name"
