Branding Explorer running as admin account.

You know by now, that you should not be running as local administrator. Instead you should use runas, when administrative permissions are needed.
Running different programs, often does not pose problems, simply start the program – but running stuff involving Explorer does. My favorite way of using Explorer is by using Internet Explorer. I do a “%programfiles%\Internet Explorer\Iexplore.exe” and enter c:\temp or whatever in the address bar.
The next problem is to keep track of whether an Explorer windows is privileged or not. I would like to brand the windows, so it is clear which mode I’m in. I tried to change window colors and themes, but they all seem to be global. Finally, I came up with Internet Explorer branding. If you change “HKCU\software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Window Title”, the text will appear on the title bar. There is just one problem – if you start iexplore with a file system path argument, the branding does not appear. Note that all command lines are bulleted so wrapping does not confused you. The command –

• "%programfiles%\Internet Explorer\Iexplore.exe" www.microsoft.com

will have the branding. This –

• "%programfiles%\Internet Explorer\Iexplore.exe" c:\temp

will not.
Can this be overcome? Yes. Use an html file that redirects to the file system path. In this way iexplore starts with html and uses the branding.
I have wrapped it all up in this bat file, which I call exp.bat –

• set url=%1
• reg add "hkcu\software\microsoft\internet explorer\main" /v "Window Title" /d "%userdomain%\%username%" /f
• set html=%temp%\explorer-redirect.htm
• echo ^<html^>^<head^>^<meta equiv="REFRESH" content="0; URL=file:%url%"^>^</head^>^</html^> > %html%
• start "" "%programfiles%\Internet Explorer\Iexplore.exe" %html%

Use it this way -

• Exp c:\temp