If your iTunes displays Welcome splash screen every time when launches, and you have figured out one way to fix this is by running iTunes as Administrator, stop it’s time to fix this. iTunes should not require the user to ‘Run as administrator‘ in order to play any music or playlist. Nor should iTunes prompt for an escalated privilege when launch. This guide will walk you through the steps to properly fix this problem.
Step 1 – Check Current User Account Type
First, we need to check if the current user account has Administrator rights or Standard user? Either case when launching iTunes, it should not prompt for an escalated privilege nor you should see a flash welcome page again and again. Make sure you are using an account with Administrator for the next step.
Step 2 – iTunes Media folder location is correct
Make sure the intended iTunes Media folder location matches with what you currently have on your hard drive. In my case, all the iTunes media is actually located under D drive and by making changes to match the media location below I’m able to fix and eliminate Welcome screen every time launches iTunes.
Step 3 – Check iTunes Library Music Directory Permission
We are not done. Locate the folder permission from the previous step. This is where things could get chaotic if you have migrated iTunes library from computer to computer over the years. Or you have used the symbolic link or other methods to mitigate disk space on your primary hard drive by moving your user profile to a different partition
Go to Security Tab > Advanced settings for “Permissions for SYSTEM“.
Check the Owner of this directory and make sure it’s under you. If you are not sure what to change, you can make a reference to another directory, say Downloads, whom should share the same Permission as your Music folder. In my case, D:\Users\Jon\Music directory is owned by some user that doesn’t exist anymore.
Update the Owner to the current user.
Confirm when Windows Security prompts on change of ownership. This will fix any administrator escalated privileges. Try out the above steps and see if any of those helps you resolve similar issues.