Droplet Not Opening Image - CS5

Question

I have created my first droplet, and it unfortunately is not working-  the droplet initates, but the desired image doesn't open, so the related actions never initiate.
Ideally the droplet opena an image, and then performs two actions.  If I manually open an image and manually run the two actions, everything is great.  But when I create the droplet, the image never opens and then the actions fail (presumably because they have no image to operate on).
I have done Internet research, and I tried the solutions I saw that suggested creating the droplet while Photoshop was opened in the "administrator" mode, as well as then changing the (security) permissions of the resulting droplet so that it is running in administrator mode.  I'm attempting this on a computer running Windows 7 and CS5 Photoshop (12.0.4 x64), and I'm the owner and sole user of the system, so folder permissions shouldn't be an issue.
Any thoughts?
  Brian

Answer 1

Curt Y wrote: 
Noel,
You bring up an issue that confuses many.  Can you clarify this?
If one drills down to the Photoshop.exe file and right click, choose properties and Compatibility tab,  there is a Privilege Level and a box to check " Run this program as an administrator".
Is this the same as right clicking on the desktop icon and choosing Run As Administrator" but just runs it this way each time it is opened?
Thanks
In Vista and Windows 7 the answer is yes, checking the box is the equivalent of choosing Run As Administrator every time, and a system set to defaults will prompt you for privilege elevation every time.
Beware of applying this advice to Windows 8 in the future, however.  There are now two different places to specify this in the Windows 8 Developer Preview, and only one of them works.  Chances are that will be fixed by the time of release, but I wouldn't bet on it.
bhillmar wrote:
I'd have to say that the feature isn't really a feature (in a Windows 7 context) if you have to bare yourself to the world by turning off UAC to make it work...
To be fair, well-behaved applications are supposed to be coded to work within the boundaries of the UAC feature...  That is to say, in normal operation they're not supposed to do things that require privilege to work, except during installation (this is why you get a UAC prompt during the install). 
This is not how some legacy applications (or new versions of applications with long development legacies) work, however.  Photoshop has a long history of being a "per-machine" application, not a "per-user" one, and older versions do have some problems working in an a UAC-enabled environment.
However, that said, virtually all of Photoshop CS4 and CS5 DO work properly withtout privilege escalation for most normal operations.  There may, in fact, be workarounds to problems with droplets - I'm not sure.  I'm not personally in a position to investigate it further myself in that I HAVE personally chosen to disable UAC for a variety of reasons (and have taken on the additional responsibility to protect my workstation from malware).
-Noel