application not working without admin Privileges

Question

I have a .net application which access few dll at runtime. The issue is, when I run the application as administrator then it works fine else it fails some where without proper error.

1. Can my application access these dll’s at run time without admin rights?

2. Is there a way to determine what all components are making it to run as administrator?

Answer 1

Only a handful of aspects in Windows strictly require Administrator privileges (i.e. installing a Windows Service), but Administrator privileges will grant you many lesser privileges - one of which is probably the reason your app works well when running as the Administrator.

You need to further investigate why your application fails. Try to run your application under a debugger and check which exception is thrown, and where. Otherwise, see if the logs (like those under the Event Viewer) and memory dumps (captured by Windows Error Reporting) contain some useful information.

Answer 2

I'm running into a similar situation and while this was written for VS2003 targeting Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, it does provide some useful guidance: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa289173(v=vs.71).aspx