Up to now, whenever I've had to perform any Active Directory maintenance tasks, I used a remote desktop connection to connect to our print server and used the admin tools there to connect to our AD domain. When we move up the hill in August, we'll no longer be running our own print server, so I thought I would see if I could install the Active Directory tools on my Vista workstation.

Long story short: To run the Active Directory management tools on Windows Vista, you need to install the Remote Server Administration Tools for Vista.

Next, you need to go into the Control Panel to 'unhide' the Active Directory tools that Windows hides from you, presumably for your own protection.

Derek Melber covers the entire process in detail over on WindowsSecurity.com.

----

The next problem I ran into was that I needed to run the AD tools using my AD admin account, which is different from my regular user account. In Windows XP/etc, you could shift+right click to get a Run As option on the context menu. With Vista, you only get Run As Administrator option, which is useless for me.

To run the AD tools as another user, I first downloaded MS's ShellRunas utility. I downloaded this utility to a (manually-created) folder c:\program files\shellrunas, then opened a command-line (cmd.exe), navigated to that folder, and ran the utility with the 'reg' switch (i.e. shellrunas /reg) to add it to the context-menu.

This worked as advertized, although I had to enter the alternate credentials twice: once for the AD tools and another time for mmc.exe. Weird, but I do this so infrequently that I can't be bothered to get rid of the annoyance.