say my application is installed in C:\programfiles\xyz\ I've some setting & other data files (*.dat files) in this directory too.

My application uses OpenFileDialog to open an image. Problem is that when ever user browses to some directory (say MyPictures) for an image. The current working directory of the application becomes that directory (MyPictures in this case).

After user inputs the image. I do some processing over it and save some values to imagedata.dat which will be located in the path where original application is installed.(C:\programfiles\xyz here )

In my code I'm just using FileStream("imagedata.dat",...,...) without any path prefix before the filename. Problem here is that application is crashing because it is searching for imagedata.dat in 'MyPictures\imagedata.dat'.

How can I avoid this?