Issues using psexec -i to launch interactive app

Question

I'm connecting to a windows machine over SSH and would like to launch a GUI app in an existing interactive session.

This should work using psexec -i, but it fails for me in various ways:

1. psexec -i 1 notepad.exe: notepad crashes without showing UI
2. psexec -i 1 cmd.exe: I get a black box the size of a cmd.exe window, it never renders. If I look at the window title with "alt-tab", it does say this is an [Administrator] process which is not what I expected.
3. psexec -i 1 <path to vscode>, it launches successfully but then raises a number of errors related to credential storage.
4. psexec -s -i 1 cmd.exe: this launches fine, but the process is running as nt authority\system, which is not what I want.
5. psexec -i 1 -u my_user -p my_pwd <path to vscode>: this works fine, but I can't require passwords and want to use ssh key-based auth instead.

I've seen a ton of questions/answers where it looks like '-i' works for people so I'm not sure what's going wrong here. Any ideas?

Answer 1

It could be due to incorrect session id. Can you check if the session id is correct, by navigating to users tab in the task manager

Screenshot of Session ID Screen