Visual Studio Administrator mode in Windows 10 - visual-studio

Question

Not really sure of my exact question, but here is the situation:
I have an application (WinForms, C# .Net) that I am developing in Visual Studio 2012. It does a lot of things but the important bit is that it needs to read files from a certain location.
In this case, the location of the files is on a server and my machine has a mapped network drive setup for accessing the files. I can manually navigate to the files with Windows Explorer fine.
I have the following line in my code which is highlighting the issue:
System.IO.File.Exists("X:\\A Folder\\a_file.txt");
And that file does exist in that location. However this is where the problem occurs: if I build the solution and run the .exe directly from the "bin" folder (double-click). The code is fine, and it finds the file. But if I run it with visual studio then I get a "file not found" exception.
I am putting this down to the fact that Visual Studio is running in "Administrator" mode (I forget why I needed this, but I do). Now this makes sense if you consider that the "administrator" account does not have the "X:\" drive mapped. However, this has never been a problem until I upgraded to Windows 10 last week.
So my question is:
Does Visual Studio Administrator mode work differently in Windows 10? In this case, does it handle mapped network drives differently?
It's worth noting I upgraded from Windows 7, so I cannot confirm if this issue is also present in 8 and 8.1 or not.
And before anyone asks, let's just say it has to be a mapped drive. No UNC paths allowed!

Answer 1

So I have found a solution/workaround. Kind of seems like a wasted bounty now, so if someone has other suggestions that are better then please post and I will review them and award as applicable. Or even if somebody can make a more detailed version of my solution then I will award that one.
The issue is probably not specific to Visual Studio, but would occur with any application running with elevated privileges. Anyway, the solution I found is to add a registry key that enables the same shared drives to be accessible when running in administrator mode.
The registry key location is:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Policies/System
And the key to add is called:
EnableLinkedConnections
And should be created as a DWORD with a value of 1 (0x00000001)
I checked with the machines running Windows 7 and they do NOT have this key, yet they still work fine. So I expect this isn't the only solution, but it does seem to work (no side effects noted yet). I would assume that Windows 10 has a specific setting somewhere that by default prevents mapped drives from automatically being available with "run as administrator".
For reference, I found this information here.
In fact, here is a more "official" recommendation for using this reg key.

Answer 2

This is unlikely to have anything to do with Windows 10, just with the configuration of your machine. What you describe is normal and covered by this KB article. Nothing I can check for myself so just try the recommended workarounds, follow up at superuser.com if necessary.

Answer 3

Different users/system tasks maybe running. As such, you have the X drive mapped, but others do not. You could do the drive mapping on additional users on your Windows installation as well. As you stated, this should not be a Windows 10 only issue, but also Windows 7+ and elevated privileges.
Maybe you could use a configured parameter for the X: path and load at runtime, or even try using UNC paths which will resolve at runtime and not need the drive to be mapped.
\\ServerNameOrIP\A Folder\a_file.txt.
In the code, you would need:
System.IO.File.Exists("\\\\ServerName\\A Folder\\a_file.txt");