I was installing Visual Studio 2008 sp1 on my fresh installation of Windows 7 RC, when my installation failed with an "Operation Aborted" message, and there's a strong chance that almost everyone trying to install VS 2008 sp1 on a X86 machine would encounter it. I found on stackoverflow that deleting the following key - HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions or other equivalent methods like renaming the key works like a cinch.

It seems to be the same "SQM bug" discovered by Rafael Rivera and reported by multiple bloggers including Paul Thurrott. And I'd agree with him that claiming "Machine Throttling" is causing the failure is a bit of a stretch, as I noticed that I didn't had "MachineThrottling" under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions. So although WinSqmStartSession() in ntdll.dll did crash on my system it didn't happen because MachineThrottling was enabled in the registry.

If you need to run the command prompt with elevated privileges on a regular basis if not as often as the standard command prompt. You probably would have have probably created a shortcut in the start menu programs folder or your desktop for easy access.

But how do can you visually differentiate between a normal command prompt window from an elevated command prompt window. Of course, the title of elevated CMD.exe is prefixed by "Administrator: " followed by <Your Shortcut Name> e.g. I always name my shortcut "ELEVATED CMD" so the title says "Administrator: ELEVATED CMD". But there's another way, you can set the colors of the command prompt windows to be visually different. I bet its easier for you to see which command prompt window below is running with elevated privileges.

Normal vs. Elevated Command Prompt

So all you gotta do is change the colors of the command prompt once inside Admin. Elevated mode and again for the normal command window (that you usually invoke via typing "CMD" in Start Menu's Run Command). You might receive a prompt to save the settings for the current Window or the shortcut that launched this window, choose the latter option. I prefer to work with white background so I have set it to Green text for Normal and Maroon for ELEVATED CMD whereas the color for popup text in both cases is gray.