I came across something odd with some new applications in MS Vista. The problem was that one application when started, made Vista show a UAC permission dialog box. The other applications did no such thing. This made me scratch my head for a while. I hunted around in MSVC’s compiler/linker dialog boxes to see if I had misconfigured it. But no such luck. After some more headscratching, I found out that if I renamed the file name of the executable, Vista didn’t prompt me anymore. So it appears Vista triggers off certain keywords to make the executables require user permissions. They all appear to be names like “patcher”, “updater” etc. See the screenshot below to see what I mean. All three executables are the same binary files, just renamed differently. But patcher and updater require security privileges and have the shield icon.

I don’t think this is going to work for long as developers will simply rename the files to avoid these names altogether. For e.g. I simply renamed my application from patchmaker.exe to packager.exe.

Adding security permission requirements based on arbitrary file names instead of just looking at the action the application is trying to perform doesn’t sound like a good idea