I just started an old program written many years ago, a few years before Vista was released. Windows (7) gave me a UAC invitation and asked for permission to run it. I was surprised because it is a relatively simple program that does nothing unusual and, of course, nothing that should require elevated privileges. Then I checked the directory and, of course, Windows put a screen icon on the program.
I quickly looked through the code and can't see anything that will obviously trigger the UAC prompt. In addition, the program shares the framework with several other programs that I wrote, none of which require a UAC requirement. This program, as well as others that do not run the UAC prompt, are stored in the same directory on the flash drive (FAT32).
The only really unique thing in this program that is different from other almost identical programs is that it uses ShellExecute to allow the user to launch the default web browser to open the selected URLs, but I cannot imagine if / why would they really require elevated permissions.
Now I'm trying to find some information about what kind of heuristic Windows uses to determine whether to use the UAC prompt or not. I know that older installers usually run a prompt, but they are usually called setup.exeor install.exe, while it has a pretty innocuous name ( udb.exe). I suspect that it detects certain function calls or some of them (of course, this would mean that Windows Explorer reads and parses all executable files that seem questionable).
I assumed that there was some information about this, but in the study I only found a few discussions off-site (there are no mentions in the lists of “similar questions” above or to the right) that list some reasons, none of which apply:
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