Application runs from VS2008 but not from exe in bin\Debug

Question

I've just encountered a rather strange problem. A Winforms (although that may not be relevant) app that I've been working on for a few months just started behaving oddly. Pressing F5 to debug in VS2008 gets it running perfectly but if I try to run the exe from the bin\Debug folder it fails straight away. Viewing more details from the notification of the failure shows this info.

Description:
Stopped working

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: CLR20r3
Problem Signature 01: languageeditor.exe
Problem Signature 02: 3.0.3593.17201
Problem Signature 03: 4aee8b42
Problem Signature 04: sysglobl
Problem Signature 05: 2.0.0.0
Problem Signature 06: 4a277628
Problem Signature 07: 8f
Problem Signature 08: d9
Problem Signature 09: System.InvalidOperationException
OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.4
Locale ID: 7177

Can anyone provide possible reasons for such a failure or things I can start looking at?

Answer 1

It turns out this was a UAC problem. On Win7 64-bit Visual Studio wants to be running as administrator for debugging against IIS (I forget exactly what message it displays) so I run VS2008 and load our solution. Our application is Silverlight but the solution includes several Winforms and console utilities. It is one of these utilities that was failing. Seems that new code I'd added requires administrator permission, which of course it gets when running in debug mode from VS2008. When launching the binary from a shortcut though, it didn't have administator access and failed.