Third Party Replacement for File Explorer?

I'm finding that File Explorer under Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 refuses
to run in Administrator mode even if you right click the EXE and run as
administrator. Apparently the UAC mechanism is always active and forces
you to a normal user permission level. That's fine for a default startup
of File Explorer, but it's a total disaster if you want to really run as
Administrator and do some file system maintenance. Someone told me that
to get around this problem you have to find a third party application that
substitutes for Explorer and then run that as Administrator.

Can someone recommend third party applications that are good substitutes for
Explorer that can help address this issue?

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W