Look at the application to manifest to see the requested execution level

Yesterday I blogged about the classic shim for suppressing the UAC prompt for certain applications. To determine why an application requests an UAC prompt you can look at the application manifest, if it has one at all. The handy little tool ManifestView lets you load an EXE file and see which requested execution level the developers have set for it.

If you should find the requested execution level to be set to something you do not like, for instance “runAsAdministrator” when what you actually want to do is to run is as a standard user, you can apply a shim to the EXE file to solve that problem. Be aware that most of the times the higher execution level is set for a reason but that does not mean you can still fix the problem, sometimes by modifying file and registry permissions for instance.