[orf]

Windows Vista, 7 and 8 come with "Remote assistance" which I find to be quite useful, get your mum to run it and (the gods willing) you will be able to access her desktop via it, without the need for extra software. I use it to fix my dads computer often.

[drunkenfly]

This won't work for me - my parents login as restricted user, and LogMeIn allows me to switch users when I need to.

I guess that £29/year is a small price to pay for that kind of feature.

[rrouse]

You could try an old trick that I used during my tech support days.

You can kill Windows explorer with task manager and then use the File/New Task option to restart explorer with a higher level user. You can then do whatever you need to as that user (e.g. control panel, delete files, add hardware, etc). When you're done, you can just repeat the process and start explorer again as the original users.

I haven't tested 100% in Windows 8 (killing and starting explorer as another user does work), but it should work in Windows 7 and below.

I used this any time right clicking an exe and selecting "run as" wasn't enough