UAC causing "An unhandled exception occured"?

[dstillman]

We had numerous reports of this last fall and earlier this year, and changing the UAC level seemed to fix it:

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/108682/zotero-experienced-an-error-updating-your-document

We're now getting new reports with the Zotero 7 release:

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/116633/zotero-integration-error-zotero-7
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/116675/when-using-zoteros-word-plugin-an-error-occurs

(There was another report that setting the app compatibility setting to Windows 8 fixed it, but I would guess that was just another way of affecting UAC, and it seems like a bad idea regardless.)

[dstillman]

(The person in the top thread implied that the UAC adjustments didn't work for them, but hard to know if that's true.)

[dstillman]

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/116745/zotero%E6%95%B4%E5%90%88%E9%94%99%E8%AF%AF

[adomasven]

I can reproduce by setting \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\EnableLUA to 0 and restarting Windows.

Docs:

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/application-security/application-control/user-account-control/settings-and-configuration?tabs=reg
• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-10/security/threat-protection/security-policy-settings/user-account-control-admin-approval-mode-for-the-built-in-administrator-account

It seems that somehow Zotero 7 no longer having SeImpersonatePrivilege enabled (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1606414) makes access to Running Object Table (ROT) not work. RotView-x64.exe utility tool used to examine the ROT has the privilege enabled, as well as Zotero 6.

I think we should tell people to set EnableLUA to 1 and not run their machines in a severely security-compromised way, instead of trying to address this in any meaningful way. On the other hand I don't think this should be a general troubleshooting step. Maybe we need to link to a separate troubleshooting page for the "Unable to find a running Word instance" error with different troubleshooting steps: OneDrive (although maybe no longer relevant) path, and this.

[dstillman]

Splitting out troubleshooting for specific errors sounds like a good idea.

[adomasven]

Setting UAC to any level above the lowest one (unfortunately, they are not named) and restarting the computer fixes this.