I've been exactly where you are!
Man, I feel your pain. Dealing with Windows permissions while trying to get a game macro running is a total rite of passage. I ran into this exact issue last year when I was trying to automate some tedious crafting. The short answer is that when you Run as Administrator, Windows often looks at a completely different set of environment variables or even a different Python installation than your normal user account.
Here are a few things that usually fix this "ghosting" module issue:
1. Check which Python you are actually using
The biggest culprit is usually that you have two versions of Python installed (maybe one from the Microsoft Store and one from python.org). When you run as admin, the system might be defaulting to a "System" path that doesn't have pywin32 installed.
Try running this command in both your normal prompt and your admin prompt:
where python
If the paths are different, that’s your problem! To fix it, instead of just typing python script.py, use the full path to the python.exe that actually has your libraries. For example: "C:\Users\YourName\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python311\python.exe" script.py.
2. The "Pip Install" Admin trick
Sometimes the packages are installed in your user-level folder (%APPDATA%), which the Admin account might not be looking at. Try opening your command prompt as administrator and force the install there specifically:
- python -m pip install pywin32
- (And then run the post-install script if it's your first time:
python Scripts/pywin32_postinstall.py -install)
3. Watch out for Virtual Environments
Are you using a venv? If you just right-click a .py file and "Run as Admin," it won't automatically activate your virtual environment. You have to open the CMD as admin first, cd into your project, run .\venv\Scripts\activate, and then run your script. If you don't activate it, Python will just look at the global library, see that win32gui is missing, and crash.
4. Quick "Dirty" Fix
If you're in a rush and just want it to work, you can add this to the very top of your script (before the imports) to see exactly where Python is looking for modules:
import sys; print(sys.path)
Compare the output between the normal run and the admin run. If the admin run is missing the site-packages folder where win32gui lives, you can manually add it using sys.path.append("your-path-here"), though fixing the PATH variables is definitely the cleaner way to go.
Give the "full path" method a shot first—that's usually the "aha!" moment for most people. Good luck with the macro!