Avoiding Program Compatibility Assistant warnings on Windows

If you're developing applications on Windows Vista or later, you may end up in a situation where this rather annoying little fellow pops up after your program execution:

"What gives?, you say, my program's not an installer and it doesn't have anything like 'setup' or 'install' in the executable name! Why does Windows pester me and my users with such a warning?" The answer: have a look at your resource file (RC, etc) and especially your versioning strings, such as "FileDescription" or "ProductName". If there's any or part of the taboo keywords in there, such as "setup", "install", "update", Windows assumes that the executable is an installer, and also assumes the worst. Thus, the solution is to never use any or part of these keywords in any of the location that Windows will look for.

For more information on how Windows "heuristically" detects installation programs, have a look at the Installer Detection Technology paragraph from the following TechNet note.

Windows UAC and bash's "Bad File Number" error

Today's problem: trying to run a freshly compiled setup_driver.exe from MSYS/MinGW produces the following:

sh: ./setup_driver.exe: Bad file number

The reason: Microsoft's implementation of UAC will try to give a free pass to any application that has "setup" in its name, and run it in elevated mode (after asking for confirmation).
This doesn't fare well with most shells running on Windows, as they don't know how to call the UAC elevation process, and you get the error above.

Rename your application to something that does not contain "setup" and your problem is gone.
Also applies to variations of "install" in your name.