Run As

Good Morning: As of late, whenever I attempt to open IE, the Prompt "Run As" window opens. What would cause this and how do I prevent it. To my knowledge no settings have been changed to cause this behavior. Thank you in advance for any info. Running Windows XP2, with IE6

 

How do you respond when this happens, and how is your response handled?

For example, I'm particularly interested to know if IE still launches were you to cancel out the RunAs prompt.

You get the RunAs prompt when you try to do something that requires higher permissions than what your user account has.

This reeks of malware to me, but I would try to first narrow down the cause. Do you have any toolbars installed? If so, I would remove them.

After that, I would disable all add-ons, and see if it still happened. If not, you could start re-enabling your add-ons one at a time until you discover which is causing the problem.

I strongly recommend that you DO NOT enter credentials at this prompt until we are certain what is causing it.

 

Not necessarily malware. Could be security software such as DropMyRights. RunAs is the same as Vista's User Account Control. It's one of the most annoying & very important security feature. You can run a program as another person/account. i.e. You logged in as Admin, but you downloaded a questionable program, you can run it as limited user so if it contains malware, it will only infect the limited user's account.

Look through your Add/Remove for DropMyRights. Uninstall it.

 

Thank you all for your advice. I believe I have the issue resolved. I deleted the IE shortcut on the desk top, then created a new one. Seems to be working fine now.