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Looking at this answer I see that someone has commented that is having the same issue, and a day of googling hasn't found me an answer.

Win10 (I'm on enterprise here at work) won't allow me as an admin user to create symlinks on a non-elevated Powershell or Command Prompt, though elevated prompts of either flavor work as expected. We have a custom tool written in Python for asset management that heavily uses symlinks that we're porting from OSX/Unix to Windows for a number of reasons. UAC is turned off as shown here, I'm an admin account on the computer. We have not yet tested on a non-admin account because this is a tool both admins and non-admins use daily, and elevated prompts require us to remap our network drives on every reboot.

Here's my security policy showing everyone should have access. Is there something obvious I'm missing?

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J. Badger
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  • I should also mention that I've explicitly added myself as an authorized user, and that failed as well. – J. Badger Mar 20 '17 at 22:59
  • https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/5d3d7a7e-3a2f-417a-9a9f-67e3351ea8a8/creating-symlinks-in-windows-10-as-a-local-admin-using-nonelevated-cmd?forum=win10itprogeneral It would appear that it really isn't possible, though this is delving into low-level stuff that I don't quite understand. – J. Badger Mar 20 '17 at 23:02
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    UAC is not turned off by just sliding it to the bottom on Windows 10 (IIRC). – Anders Mar 20 '17 at 23:52
  • When Windows was first written, it seemed like a good idea to have very granular privileges that the system administrators could turn on and off. Experience has (IMO) shown otherwise, and when UAC was introduced Microsoft made no effort to support what you're trying to do. I think you'll need to either redesign your tool to not use symlinks, or run it with admin privilege, or implement some other workaround. (You could have a system service that creates the symlinks on your behalf, for example.) – Harry Johnston Mar 21 '17 at 02:46
  • I'd suggest using junctions rather than symlinks. Junctions do not require admin permissions. – Venryx Jul 06 '21 at 03:43

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