Performance issue for WPF application when is running without right clicking and choosing "Run as administrator"

Question

I have a WPF application which will be used on tablets with Windows 10. In my development environment, the application runs very fast. However, if I run the application on tablet without admin rights, the application responds very slow : all animations are slow, the scrolling is not smooth, and touch problems are visible (cannot move the caret). If the application has admin rights all things are working fine.

I tried to disable the logs, I tried to decrease the FPS, nothing seems to help. My application is connected to a sqlite database, but even without accessing the database is very slow. There are no other connections that may require admin rights. What could be the problem?

EDIT: Also in my dev environment the app is running slower without admin rights. I was running the VS2015 with admin rights and for that reason the application worked fine.

Answer 1

WPF has settings under HKEY_CURRENT_USER that can disable hardware acceleration:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa970912(v=vs.110).aspx

If the Disable Hardware Acceleration Option or the Use Reference Rasterizer Option are set, a WPF application will run slowly for that user.