Suppose a program is running with elevated privileges already, and it needs to see the contents of the System Volume Information folder, and by default, only NT Authority\System can do that. A workaround would be to change ACL's on the folder, but I don't want to mess with that. I already found two ways to do it: the task scheduler and psexec. They are too indirect, I don't even need to describe the first one, and the second one works by installing a windows service, running it, telling it to run whatever I wanted to run, then uninstalling the service. Now the question is: is there a direct, simple WinAPI function to run something as system? I don't think that such an API would circumvent the security restrictions, as an administrator I have the right to schedule a task or install a service, so there must be a shortcut.