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claudiu's avatar
claudiu
Copper Contributor
Sep 09, 2025

Registry setting to exclude specific processes from UI Automation

Hi everyone, I'm dealing with a system-wide UIA blocking issue caused by one problematic application that interferes with my other applications that rely on UI Automation functionality. One applica...
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Surya_Narayana's avatar
Surya_Narayana
MCT
Sep 11, 2025

hi claudiu​ At present there isn’t a supported registry setting to disable UI Automation (UIA) for a specific process. Windows doesn’t provide a per-process exclusion mechanism similar to Image File Execution Options for UIA — the framework is enabled or disabled system-wide.

A few alternatives you might consider:

Whitelist your automation scope: Limit UIA queries in your own tools to specific processes/windows instead of enumerating everything.

Process isolation: Run the problematic app in a restricted environment (low integrity or AppContainer) to reduce its ability to interfere with system-wide UIA.

Provider-level blocking: If the application uses custom UIA providers, you may be able to block or control their DLL load with AppLocker or WDAC.

Unfortunately, there’s no built-in registry “DisableUIAutomation” flag today. If this is a blocker, I’d strongly recommend submitting feedback via Feedback Hub (Win+F) or the Developer Community so the engineering team can consider adding per-process exclusion in the future.

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