>You must REALLY be deurinated on, to offer a title luring readers in with hopes of SQL fun but the meat is only a rant on a MS product ;-)

Saw this?
>>Set Rant Half

That's exactly what I meant - it's half rant, but the other half is actually funny. I mean, it can't work without a folder you knew nothing about? Huh? Man, I'd lose my beard if I wrote something with that kind of bug. It's ridiculous what M$ gets away with, and mind you, IMO SQL is the best piece of software they have (since they don't have VFP anymore - I don't consider "buy the whole train and you get a seat" as "seat is offered").

Speaking of hardcoded paths, I think W2000 was the last one you could install somewhere else and C:\windows wasn't mandatory. One of daughters and I both had machines without c: drive for a while, and I even had 2-3 installations of W2k (or some other) on the same machine. Didn't have a boot manager so I could boot only the last one - the others were there for cases when I may need to restore a dll of some piece of config - and it was interesting to see who didn't use the environment variables to find system folders, but went blindly for c:\windows\system\something and crashed because there was no c: drive. Don't remember where XP was on this, maybe it also could survive without C: or agree to install on c:\whp or some such folder, maybe not. Vista and later, no, not relocatable, all paths are hardcoded, no matter the environment variables.