Secure desktop is supposed to block this from happening . How does it work ? Well here ' s my shitty explanation . The windows environment is kinda like a playground , you got lots of applications having fun and hopefully they all get along and its a perfect world . But they do have the functionality to hurt eachother and manipulate what the user sees . So when UAC is called , it isnt called on your standard desktop . It needs a safe place where it can ' t be tampered with , so it asks the kernal to create a new desktop outside the range of all running programs so they can ' t tamper with it . In addition to this the regular desktop UI is suspended , so it can ' t update which means it ' s essentially frozen . Then the UAC prompt is displayed on the secure desktop awaiting user input , as malicious programs can ' t tamper with it .