thanks

I’m guessing you are referring to full screen games, not windowed games like solitaire. Unfortunately this is basically impossible to do with Windows.

Here is a little more detailed explanation.

Technical Background: Windows handles multi-monitors like so. In WindowsXP there is a Primary monitor, and additional monitors may be enabled by extending the desktop to include these additional monitors. With a proprietary video card control panel and driver, these additional monitors can also be “clones” of the primary monitor, but there is still only one Primary monitor.

Problem #1: Games are generally programmed to run only on the Primary monitor. If the game does support multi-monitor (think flight sims), it usually spans across all the monitors. Say you have a Flight Sim running and subsequently load Madden. Madden will minimize the Flight Sim, and only run itself on the Primary monitor, blanking out the other monitors. The game has to be programmed to enable monitor mapping; this is not easy to accomplish, rarely do people want this functionality, so subsequently no one ever programs for it.

Problem #2: Windows only allows for one active Session at a time to interact with the graphics subsystem. The “Run As” feature runs a program for you using another user’s permissions, but still in your active Session. If you would try to do a “Switch User”, that program would not be active in their Session, only yours. So you cannot load the Flight Sim with your account and then do a Run As command to load Madden as a workaround. Since it is a process active in your Session, and it still has to obey problem #1.

Problem #3: One input device focus point. Since Windows only allows one active Session (think one user), there is no reason to have multiple cursors on the screen. Think of a laptop. You can have a touchpad, a nub mouse, a bunch of USB mice, and a few Bluetooth mice all connected, but you will only have one cursor/arrow. What about gamepads you say? Yes there are multiple input paths, but they always interact with one process at a time. If the Windows input handler doesn’t notice any reserved keystroke like “CTRL-ALT-DEL” or a globally registered hotkey, it passes the input to the window that has focus. So there is no way to interact with both games at the same time.

Solution: You need to have an operating system that will concurrently allow multiple input devices mapped to multiple Sessions, that are mapped to different Monitors, and have those different Sessions interact with your multiple game instances. This isn’t Windows.

Cheviot. I know about Remote Desktop Connection and Terminal Services and how it allows multiple users to have multiple Sessions on one Windows computer, but this is not what the question deals with. RDC and TS allow multiple computers or thin clients to run and view a session remotely, but the current user on the server machine still cannot view all of those sessions individually on that machine, only their active one.

Without seeing your computer, I couldn’t begin to suggest what the problem might be. One possible problem though - maybe the program you are trying to launch doesn’t allow more than one instance at a time to be run? Maybe there is something in the code that prevents this hack from being carried out? Just a thought. If you have Skype, try that and see if it works.

Also you could check the accounts one more time to make sure that administrator rights really have been granted.

I have XP service pack 2 also and it works fine for me. But from a distance, I can’t begin to properly analyse your problem.

On the OUTLOOK side of things - I can confirm that NO, you cannot run multilple Outlooks using this method. I REALLY need to as I run 2 business and we are forever sending emails with the wrong signature or from the account. Never mind - back to the drawing board…

Once you’ve done that, run Windows under the adminstrator account. You should now be able to see the other accounts under “run as”

Can anyone shed any light on this for me please?