When runas was introduced, it took all of us a little bit of time to figure out how to do the things the way we were used to. Though it didn’t seem we could perform a runas on explorer, many of us found that we could use Internet Explorer to browse our folders like it was explorer. Then came IE7 and that ability went away.
By default, if we tried to run explorer out of runas we’d find that the shell would open with the same account we already had running. Though Microsoft has taken away the ability to launch an explorer shell under alternate credentials starting with Vista, the following command works for Windows XP and Windows 2003 (even though the SeparateProcess registry value no longer does):
runas /u:domainuser “explorer /separate”
Enjoy it while it lasts! Won’t be long now…
NOTE: Microsoft never intended to launch explorer under alternate credentials and does not support this scenario.