How does RFC work on PCs with multiple users? (unimportant question)

[Firefly518]

Not a critical question and doesn't affect my RFC usage right now - just curious how it works and understand its quirks.

A few days ago I was updating stuff on my brother's Windows 11 PC which runs RFC and has 2 users, both admin, both binded to personal Microsoft Accounts.

When I was doing the maintenance I noticed that RFC appears to run on only one user at a time. When I logged into my account which is seldom used, RFC's icon was missing from the taskbar, but I can still tell from the fan noise level that it was running.

Attempting to launch the RFC executable gave me a prompt saying that it would kill the process on the other account and start it on my one, after which I was able to access the UI. It's icon also appeared in the taskbar.

I tried this again on a different PC (my own). While my (admin) account was logged in, I also went into my dad's (non-admin) account and tried to launch the RFC executable, and when prompted, using my account's password to provide the required admin privileges.

Nothing happened on my dad's desktop, but when I moved back over to my own desktop, the RFC UI window was in my face. So apparently I launch the UI on one account and it pops up in another.

I'm pretty sure that the difference in behavior across the two PCs is caused by the first one having 2 admin accounts and the second one having 1 admin + 1 regular account.

But I'm still curious, how exactly does RFC handle multiple Windows users? And is it possible to get temperature icons to show up consistently in the taskbar of every user?

Prior to looking into this, I assumed that RFC must have two components:

1. A background process (I assumed a Windows service), which

• runs at startup
• runs persistently across all users (the same instance)
• hosts the taskbar icons across all users
• reads from the config file and applies its fan settings to the hardware

2. A front-end component, which

• only opens when the control panel window is open
• runs as a separate instance on each user that launches it
• hosts the control panel
• applies changes the user made in the control panel to the config file and prompts the background process to reload settings

However I appear to be completely wrong. I cannot find a Windows service that appears to be 1), and FanControl.exe does not behave like 2) at all.

[Rem0o]

Fancontrol is a simple monolithic application. One process with the engine and ui combined. It will indeed only run on an admin account. Your observations are the expected behaviour.