Finally got round to trying to get root on this and was successful fairly quickly (once I’d rewritten one of the PoC tools in VB of course). Pretty much just look at what your account is allowed to do, google it, and you’ll find some examples and code to help.
I don’t really agree with people saying that needing to use VS is a problem. The free version will do everything you need.
At the end of the day HTB exists to help you learn/practice real world hacking techniques, and if one of those techniques requires you to install a completely free piece of software on the world’s most common desktop OS, I don’t think HTB should feel like they have to avoid that.
In a real world pentest, you can’t expect your customers network to be tailored specifically to the OS and tools you prefer using. If you’re attacking Windows machines, I think its perfectly reasonable to expect you to have a Windows machine and be willing to use a free tool like VS. If you don’t like that then maybe stick to attacking the Linux boxes