I first came across this issue when helping a customer uninstall Site Recovery Manager last year and wanted to blog about it but because I was pretty busy it totally slipped my mind….. until today!! I’ve been cleaning up the Solution Centre at MTI and tried to uninstall SRM for a new build…. and came across the same Windows User Access Control error. =)

Turns out that in Windows 2012. even when you go into User Accounts to turn off the UAC, it doesn’t disable it.

There’s a Microsoft Technet article which explains how to edit the Windows Registry in order deactivate UAC.

1. Go to Start > Run, type regedit and click OK. The Registry Editor window opens.
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Microsoft > Windows > CurrentVersion > policies > system.
3. Right-click EnableLUA and select Modify.
4. In the Edit DWORD window, change the Value data from 1 to 0.
5. Restart the Windows machine and re-run the SRM uninstall program.