<p>I am working on a small application in VB.NET. The program needs administrator privilege for doing some tasks. Is there a way to ask for administrator privileges during the execution if the program?</p>

<p>What is the general way of changing the user account under which the application is running?</p>

You can specify this in your application's manifest file.
Check out
this link
and
this link
and
this link
too.