Why does windows-xp setting environment variable to %USERPROFILE% return the wrong path

Question

I am trying to set HOME to be %USEPROFILE% for the currently logged on user. However, creating a system environment variable HOME and setting to and setting it %USERPROFILE% does not seem to work. After logging out and logging in as a non-administrative user, I have

c:\ set
...
HOME=c:\Documents and Settings\administrator
HOMEPATH=c:\Documents and Settings\[user]
...

In the Windows Environment Variables dialog, I have

HOME   %USERPROFILE%

but don't see HOMEPATH anywhere. Can anyone tell me how to fix this?

Answer 1

It is a little unclear from your question, but it sounds like the problem is that the HOME environment variable is being assigned the expanded value of %userprofile% (c:\Documents and Settings\administrator) at time of configuring it, rather than being stored as the string literal %userprofile% which would be expanded after login.

It's been a while since I worked with this sort of thing on XP, bu if I recall, permanent environment variables are stored in the registry.

set usually only works in the current cmd session, so to get it to be across all sessions,there is a setx util (from Microsoft) that will permanently set env variables.

One trick is to make a batch file which runs at startup (put it in the startup folder of all users) which runs setx. This will ensure that %userprofile% expands to the currently logged in user's profile.