I ran into this same problem. It turns out that no password is set for your administrator account. Here's what you need to do. 1) Boot into Safe Mode with Command Prompt. It will not give you a choice of users, but logs you in directly to your normal user account. 2) Once the command prompt comes up, hit ctrl-alt-del and switch users to Administrator. Once the command prompt comes up for administrator, enter this command: net user administrator /active:yes 3) Now hit ctrl-alt-del again and restart the computer. When it comes up it will log you in to your normal account again. This time switch users to your Administrator account. It should not ask you for a password since no password is set. 4) From here, go to User Accounts and set a password for your Administrator account. 5) Now switch users back to your normal user account again. Now when you perform actions that require elevation, it will actually give you a place to enter the password. This issue occurred for me as part of the default installation flow for a new Windows 7 Pro install. Amazing - I can't believe they shipped with this problem. -Don