Hmm, I seem to have the same issue with the AdvancedButtonApp tutorial. Works as expected under the debugger, but not when I just deploy the solution to the Netduino.
Is there some kind of timing issue that's causing this? Has anybody else got this working outside the debugger?
D'oh! Dumb mistake - I was just selecting the "Deploy Solution" menu option from the Build menu. I needed to select "Start Without Debugging" from the Debug menu to get the solution to actually run.
Now both programs work as expected.
Move along, nothing to see here...