Unknown Publisher requires Elevation on Windows 7 – Self Created EXE

This has been bugging me for the past two days. I tried to create executables (EXEs) from both “Bat to Exe Converter” and SharpDevelop. Every time I created an EXE, it would have this wonderful little UAC shield on the icon:

When I double clicked on the EXE, I received a message stating that file has an unknown publisher and it requires administrative credentials. The file does nothing more than display text on the screen so I had no idea why I could not run the simple file. I’ve also created hundreds of EXEs before on the same computer so something was not correct.

I thought the recent anti-virus component addition caused a UAC setting to change. Fortunately, I stumbled upon (not the one you think) this article on SuperUser.com:

http://superuser.com/questions/102975/how-to-tell-windows-7-that-an-application-does-not-need-to-run-with-admin-rights

Apparently:

Before a 32 bit process is created, the following attributes are checked to determine whether it is an installer:

• Filename includes keywords like “install”, “setup”, “update”, etc.

Since I created the file with the word “install”, Windows 7 assumed it required admin permissions and took it upon itself to require admin permissions to run the file anyway. I created the EXE with a different name and it worked as expected!

Here’s the Microsoft article that explains it:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb756960.aspx