Patrick Elliott wrote:
>
> Well.. Windows XP and Vista basically mount a "directory" called "My
> Documents", which can be pretty much any place. In the "default" state
> its usually something like "C:\Documents and Settings\Patrick\My
> Documents". 

Yes - and it's ment for exactly what it says, your documents, which are
only a part of your profile.

> This "Can be" changed, but doing so is a bit... obscure, and

Yes, AFAIK for either one user at time or via AD. Or is there a
(official preferred) way to move all users's documents at once?

> it **won't** move the folder contents that are already there. Worse,
> just to make things sillier, when you "do" change it, unless you have
> "full" rights on the machine (or even if you do, if you are using some
> "other" application to copy things, not just the inbuilt stuff), you
> lose the rights to access the files, as soon as you move the location,
> so, you can't then fix it.

Might be, I've never tried. You still can take ownership as an
administrator and fix things around.

> Now, where this gets fun is if you have something that asked the OS
> where to "install" documents and settings, then stored that, but never
> double checks to see if its "still" the same place. I.e., its not a true
> mount, which would also move not just the symbolic lookup, but the
> "logical" location of the files, such that accessing "My Documents"
> would "still" give you the right thing, so.. unless it presents what
> "should be", based on what it "appears" to be doing, a redundant call to
> "what is Patrick's document folder", ever time it tries to access, it
> instead uses the "prior" location, which is no not only invalid, but
> unprivileged, which leads to all sorts of whining by the application
> that it can't open the files.

Stupid software, but if instead of assigning D: to your work-partition
you mount it to c:\documents and settings, it seems to be at original
place even for Windows, allthought it's on another partition than the
system. Even such software you described can't mess that up.

> Of course, one of the odder "glitches" this presented was a case where
> save games where somehow marked as "temp" in the mess of the file
> system, under this design, such that, "clearing temporary files", also
> somehow wiped all the save games... I still haven't worked out how that
> happened..

And you're still sure this happened because of relocated My documents?

-Aero

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