>> It still amuses me that this program can't print on any network 
>> printer who's name is more than 8 characters long...
> 
> Comes as not much of a surprise. It's rather a miracle that it can 
> access networked printers at all...

I'm guessing Windows does a sufficiently good job of pretending they're 
actually local. ;-)

We have another program that goes with this one. It's written in QBASIC. 
It requires a laser printer that understands PCL to be mapped to LPT2:. 
(I'm not sure what I could add to this description that would make it 
sound any worse...)

>> Oh, sure, it could put the installer file in
>>
>>   %profile%\Local Settings\Temp
>>
>> But it doesn't. It puts it in
>>
>>   %profile%\Application Settings\Adobe\Acrobat\Updater
>>
>> The Java installer does something similarly retarded for some reason. 
>> Maybe it's an IE quirk of some kind?
> 
> I'd presume it's a safety measure to not end up with a crippled 
> installation: Files in %profile%\Local Settings\Temp can be recycled by 
> Windows' disk cleanup assistant. If the updater is designed using a 
> multi-step approach, and there's a serious possibility that the steps 
> may be run at very distinct points in time, you'll want those files to 
> still exist when the second step commences.
> 
> If the updater cleans up after work, there shouldn' be a problem. If it 
> fails to do, it somehow defies the exact purpose of the disk cleanup 
> assistant, and would therefore need to be called poor design.

It downloads the installer, runs it, and then JUST LEAVES IT THERE. So, 
yeah, poor design.

But then again, as Warp pointed out, Java likes to cache every applet 
you've ever run, and provides no easy way (that I can discover) to 
remove this cache...

> Most software is pretty sane about this, storing /user/-specific 
> settings in HKCU/Software/CompanyName/ProgramName, so the biggest 
> obstacle is figuring the users' IDs.
> 
> Plus the fact that some software may not be using the registry to store 
> settings, but files in one of the many %profile% subfolders instead.

The really fun thing is that you can't edit a user's registry chunk 
without loading it first...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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