Disable "Unity is running as administrator" popup warning

Maybe this has been posted/asked already and i did'nt find it...
But please, by the love of god, let me disable this message popup

I'm pretty aware of anything security related when running unity as administrator, so no need to remind me ever startup about this...
Any commandline/startup option or something ?

did not find anything in the alpha manual ...

 

Maybe its important to add that i'm on windows. Besides that i'm pretty curious why things should not work when your user belongs to the administrator group ( again , talking about windows, dont care about MacOS, Linux or anything else )
I would certainly like to know what features might behave like you describe when running under a user that belongs to the administrator group. At least on windows you would have to do pretty awkward things to make it like that

 

Thanks for the detailed response, i understand now that the dialog is specific to the built-in administrator only
Anyways, in my whole time using Unity i never come across an issue that might be caused by or even linked to running unity elevated/as built-in admin. Or any one in your list.
But i understand that the dialog will not go away, as i'm the uncommon dog here as it seems

Regarding why i run my machine that way:
I constantly, always and since ever do things on my machines that potentially "brick the machine", in fact that trains to not brick it and know exactly what one is doing. I constantly touch and bend "core" windows things to not have it get them in the way. But i see thats nothing for the broad masses. , so we can end this discussion

BTW: this is my 666'th post .... coinsidence ?

 

Hi. I would very much like to know how not to run as Administrator, and get rid of the Popup. I've checked Settings in Hub and Unity and nono seems to be elevated but never the less i get the warning. I'm the only user on the PC and as such I am the admin, but i take it from the comments here that's not an issue. Please advice.
Thanks Ole Jørgensen

 

Hey!
I have a similar problem. Unity Hub is launched with elevated rights, but there is no check mark in the properties. I do not know what to do with it. In the pop-up window, the "Restart" button does not help to start the editor with normal user rights.
I'm not sure, but it seems to me that the first task is launched without elevated permissions, and the rest with elevated permissions.

Spoiler: Images

"С повы..." - elevated
"Да" - Yes
"Нет" - No
"Выполняется" - run/running
"Запускать эту программу от имени администратора" - running as administrator

UPD:
I'm sorry I write so often. It looks like an installer bug. I decided to completely remove the Unity editor and Unity Hub and repeat the installation from 0. It looks like when you download the Unity Hub installer, run it with elevated rights to install Unity Hub, and at the end of the installation leave the daw active - run Unity Hub, then Unity Hub starts with elevated rights, and then the editor installation follows Unity and Visual Studio and much more.

When I removed this checkmark and launched Unity Hub after the installer had completely finished working, Unity Hub started without elevated rights, as it should be.

The problem has completely disappeared.

UPD 2:
I have also enabled UAC on level 2.

 

I have UAC disabled on my account (I take the proper precautions with stuff I download online, don't worry) and as a result I get this popup every time I launch Unity

there should be a way to just tell Unity that you accept the risk and make it go away as these kinds of situations make it impossible to run it without Administrator privileges without changing system settings and rebooting your machine

 

Seriously, don't run end-user software as Administrator. Anyone doing it is just asking for problems, and anyone depending on it needs to rethink it.

 

To be honest that is a rather unpolite and borderline unprofessional answer, and I'd ask you to please reconsider how you address people in the forums. On top of that, you need to realize that your viewpoint may be flawled, so refrain from shutting down people viewpoints like that.

Now Im suffering that senseless msgbox, and when I come to the forums to read about it, I found that:

• The purpose of such msg, is to cover Unity from accountability in case of complains about some exotic bugs that no one even knows for sure what may be.
• Someone decided that Unity should not be supported when running on a configuration that results inconvenient for Unity devs.

WHAT?

So in practical and professional terms, this is what I would expect:

• Unity should support running Unity as administrator, but simply list the known issues that its devs consider are related to such scenario, and beyond their control. You know, standard stuff.
• Unity devs in the forums should be open to exchange and address people with politeness, understanding that sometimes the decisions they take are against the daily experience of thousands of other devs.

To add to my perspective, I'd like to enumerate:

1. We are only asking for a checkmark for that msg box to go away, because is in the way of the daily work of devs who need to run things on their desktops in a certain way.
2. Secondly, disabling UAC is a perfectly valid setup option, and I have been working like that on my desktop environments for more than a decade. Unity should not be declaring a certain configuration unsupported.
3. I have also been using Unity for about 15 years, but just now when updating to 2022.2.1f1 (from 2022.1) started getting that annoying msgbox.

 

Yeap. I would like to clarify that UAC on Windows was disabled immediately after it was installed. And that leads to this annoying message. After enabling UAC - Unity Hub began to run without elevated permissions. It is noteworthy that further disabling UAC did not lead me to this annoying message. Magic.

 

Oh jeez that did the trick! Thanks a ton for sharing. As you mentioned, I just enabled UAC, restarted, ran Unity, then disabled back UAC and the pestering message is gone. All we needed! As usual, the community to the rescue

Edit:
It is also worth noting that the result of that is that Unity no longer runs as elevated, and thus the message is no longer displayed. This is a solution for those devs with UAC disabled, but some devs actually required to run Unity as administrator (I've read some devkits require that) will still struggle with the senseless situation.

 

Hello,

I am not sure where to ask, but here seems the right-ish place.

Since updating to 2022.2, our automated builds (which run not in batch mode, for lightmapping reasons), no longer execute. Unity simply hangs when being run from the command line.

I cant seem to figure out why unity might be trying to run elevated. The user account is not admin, Jenkins is not elevated, and we dont have any "run as administrator" box ticked. This is a really big issue for us at the moment.

Any help sorting this out would be amazing.

Thanks

 

Thanks so much for the speedy reply!

You are correct, jenkins is running as a service.

I have never seen -automated and can't find it documented anywhere in the unity docs.

This did however, solve the issue, so thank you very much!

I am not 100% sure its the administrator pop up, Unity just straight up hangs when being launched. Nothing is logged, and it sits there spinning for forever. This is new since 2022.2. It's pretty hard to diagnose exactly what the issue might be.

That said, problem solved haha

Thanks

 

if you have checked run as administrator in unity .exe file then disable it cause unity doesn't find it safe to do this. If it is happening suddenly then this solve is for you.
Because somehow some program or you have selected NEVER NOTIFY FOR ANY CHANGE in UAC (user account control settings). Search fro UAC or user account control is search and Pull that to option notify(check the screenshot) will disable this nasty warning which is appearing from nowhere every time. Then restart your computer.

**Be careful from cracked games and software. Some malwares are able to modify your windows settings without letting you know anything and will make your computer unusable.
What Always notify is telling is every time some app or program tries to make change it will let you know and until you press yes it won't proceed further.

 

I wanted to make a comment on this as I am running into the exact same issue. I read through this topic as well as several others like the official Unity update post and a smaller one opened by someone else regarding not being able to start Unity outside of Administrator access.

I have also tried the above video to get rid of the message which does not work for me.

I tried several approaches going as far as removing my whole Windows install and going with a fresh windows 10 and 11 install in which I force admin rights of the account I am on, and the same issue appears.

It only happens in the Unity 2022 versions and 2023 versions and for me clicking standard user also does not remove the popup until I click on the little cross the close the popup and then Unity boots up.

It's incredibly frustrating to having to deal with this popup over and over again and because I can't use certain Unity features the game that I have out on Steam is now stranded as I can't push certain updates.

Overall, it's one of the most annoying bugs I encountered and it's 100% a bug at Unity their side and not on the user their side.

There are no elevated rights running in on both Unity Hub and when the Hub isn't even installed on the Editor itself, the task manager does not see the elevated rights, registry keys show that there is none either.

No matter if Unity is installed on an admin account or an account within any form of admin rights the same issue persists and for what I can see has this been an issue for over a year now and it still has not been fixed.

It first appeared in the beta build of 2022, it has been directly reported and ever since Unity puts the problem with the developer and not with itself. Then when the LTS version comes out the problem persists and also happens to become a reality in the 2023 install, the 2023 beta install and the 2023 alpha. install.

For me it's incredibly frustrating as I cannot properly use Unity anymore and have already been considering switching to Unreal just because this update gives me so much trouble that with the time it takes to be fixed, I would already have been able to successfully port it to Unreal Engine 5.

Overall, I don't understand why Unity keeps blaming us and not work this out after so much complains about it.

 

How fresh of an installation are we talking about here? Are you trying Unity as soon as you've finished installing Windows and the minimum required device drivers? Are you installing any third party software like antivirus?

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TUczNa88xIUsvgcldQ52PA24mr9puzHC/view?usp=sharing ZIP

 

So what is the solution finally ?

I got this message after installing the 2022 lts version, I don't understand the "Running Unity as admin is completely unsupported", if I uncheck the box that allow to run as administrator, the unity hub don't even start anymore ... so it obviously need it

 

Thanks for your reply.

I meant with the run as administrator box unchecked on the unityHub.exe file, then the unityhub won't start. Only work if I check the box. But of course after I get the message that I should not run as administrator it's like the snake biting its own tail

 

I have this issue as well, it is definitely on unity side, I have one PC with windows11 which works fine and notebook with windows10 where I am getting this warning and can't get rid of it.

 

Just to share with you this Unity 2022 bug of "running as administrator".
Nothing mentioned above worked for me except that "-automated" command line argument, but this just gets rid of the message and the editor runs as administrator even though.
Furtheremore running any project in 2022 version consumes twice as much memory than the 2021 version. So as far as it will be possible I will not upadate to 2022 and certailny will not recommend it to do so.

 

Im going to jump into this thread since its still pretty active and i think i have a more unique situation compared to everyone else here.

So I am the IT System admin at a high school and we recently obtained education licenses and installed unity hub and We installed LTS 2022.3.7f1. Since the students are domain users, they have restrictions to not have any administrative privileges and have no control over the OS drive. When I installed unity I had no choice but to install with our local admin user. Now once we log into a student user and launch unity, we get the administrator mode warning. Why would we be getting that warning when students don't event have permissions to run anything in administrator mode?

Our group policies have the computers UAC setting to level 1, and the only way to get unity to launch in standard mode is to raise UAC to the highest level and restart the computer. The issue with this is that our group policy eventually reverts UAC back to level 1 which causes the message to return.

We have never had this issue in the past back with the 2019 versions before unity hub was being forced down everyones throats. So does this mean for this issue to be fully avoided, we would have to completely change up our group policy for UAC to stay at a higher level?

And from what I'm seeing from others in this thread is that this wasn't an issue until the 2022 versions released? If we went back to a 2019/2020 version like we used in the past, would this potentially no longer be an issue?

 

It's been many months using Unity and it always opens as administrator even though I didn't mark it to be. I have crashes even in the LTS version, which cause almost all applications on my PC to stop working, I thought it was related to RAM, but I have 32 GB and it happens even with a very small scene open in the background.

I think it may be related to me running as administrator, which is unsupported (and I understand it must be unsupported). It happened to me again now and I looked more carefully how not to make it run as administrator.

With this thread, it seems to me that there is a serious bug in Unity, many people seem to have a problem with Unity opening as admin, even if they don't want to.

I opened again and looked in the properties of all running exes related to Unity, none are marked to start as administrator. I've certainly never set anything to open as admin before.

"Elevated" details tab shows all Unity related marked as "yes", except 3 "Unity Hub" processes.

I also opened the Unity .exe straight from the folder without using Unity Hub. Same.

Another detail is that if I click on "Restart Unity as a standard user", it does nothing.

edit: Fixed, bellow.

 

Fixed: My UAC was off, fixed by enabling it and rebooting.
If it is expected and not a bug, Unity could detect this and warn the user to enable UAC.

 

I encountered this problem when I upgraded to

Windows 11

. I kept getting the

"Unity is running as administrator

"-popup warning even though:

• I hadn't chosen to start Unity Hub in administrator mode,
• I hadn't chosen to start the Unity.exe in administrator mode
• Neither of their Settings were set to "run in Administrator mode".

What I found is that it seems Windows 11, if you are logged in on the main

Administrator

-account, will sometimes start programs in

elevated Administrator mode

despite you not explicitly asking it to do so.

My fix (sharing in case it helps someone!):

• Create a new Windows 11

  Standard account

  (you can mark this new as having with

  Administrator privileges

  , I did and it caused no issues)
• Log into that account.

Now, for me, Unity stopped running in admin-mode and I could continue developing in the Engine. Hope it helps someone

 

I never asked for this...
Installed the 'windows 10' years ago and instantly disabled UAC, my account is administrator never wanted to start Unity with elevated. And yet I'm clicking that annoying popup message every day to start it "at my own risk...." I will never use windows UAC and will never use non-admin user. no way.

 

(sorry for the Google translation)
Good morning,
To solve this problem, it's simple, it all depends on Widows' UAC. If you have disabled UAC with third-party software (e.g. Winaero Tweaker):
1 - Reactivate UAC mode with the software used.
2 - Restart your computer.
3 - Launch from the control panel "Control Panel\All Control Panels\Security and Maintenance"
4 - Left-click on “Change User Account Control settings”.
5 - Place the slider on the highest level, reboot, start a Unity project, close it, restart.
6 - Return to the UAC control panel, place the slider at minimum, restart.
Et voilà !

Greetings
--------------------------------------------
Message original en Français :

Bonjour,
Pour résoudre ce problème, c'est simple, tout dépend de l'UAC de Widows. Si vous avez désactivé l'UAC avec un logiciel tiers (par exemple Winaero Tweaker) :
1 - Réactiver le mode UAC avec le logiciel utilisé.
2 - Redémarrez votre ordinateur.
3 - Lancez à partir du panneau de configuration "Panneau de configuration\Tous les Panneaux de configuration\Sécurité et maintenance"
4 - Cliquez à gauche sur « Modifier les paramètres du contrôle de compte d'utilisateur ».
5 - Placez le curseur sur le niveau le plus élevé, redémarrez, lancez un projet Unity, fermez-le, redémarrez.
6 - Retournez dans le panneau de configuration UAC, placez le curseur au minimum, redémarrez.
Et voilà !

Salutations

 

My story why Unity was running as admin and how I fixed it.

Many years ago i turned off UAC through regestry
([HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System] "EnableLUA"=dword:00000000)

It makes all programs i launch run with admin rights (elevated) automatically. I needed this for certain reasons. This lead to that warning with Unity 2022. Setting UAC level to highest, restarting PC and setting UAC level back to lowest reverted the regestry setting and made it so all programs now launch with normal privileges, including Unity and Hub. Thus annoying Unity popup does not appear anymore.

 

Finally fixed 2023.3.f1

What worked:
1) Search for unity.exe under Program Files.
2) Right click properties.
3) Go to Comparability tab
4) Run "Run compatibility troubleshooter"
5) Try recommended settings which set it to Windows 8.


What didn't work:
Tried turning down and up UAC after reboots.
Elevate is not listed in task manager. Apparently the equivalent in "Details" tab is UAC virtualization which "Not Allowed" means it is elevated. Disabled is what you want to see.