Why does Windows 7 have accelerator key combinations that cannot be used?

"Er, if you hit Shift + F10 to open the context menu, you can just press A to select Run as Administrator and then hit Enter.

No need to hold Alt, as it just toggles menus, so I guess when it's already open and you press Alt it toggles it off.

Edit: The only reason I need to press Enter is that I have two options in my context menu that have A as the accelerator ( Run as administrator, Copy as path ), so pressing A switches between those two. If you choose any menu option that has a unique accelerator you just need to press that key."

"The Alt key always closes menus. This has been that way for ages. In general, Alt allows for the following:

access top-level menus in an application
access accelerators of controls on the current form (needed when the focus is on text boxes for example; otherwise the accelerator key itself suffices)

As for menus, Alt simply toggles. It will switch into ""menu mode"" when pressed once and it will close any menu that is currently open when it's pressed when a menu is open.

As others have noted, there are faster ways to start a program as administrator, most notably Ctrl+Shift+Enter."