Pete Brown is a WPF guy and I've learned a lot from him. Now I get to watch him learn. Recently he wanted to write an add-in for IE and he decided to do it in C++. You can see how he struggled through it and get some tips of your own in the
detailed post he wrote about the experience. I agree with the commenter who said you should only run Visual Studio as admin when you know you're going to do a step (like registration) that requires elevation, and you should run non-elevated the rest of the time, and the one who tweaked the string code to take advantage of being in C++. If you have some tweaks of your own, stop by and add a comment.
Kate