>>>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.
>
>... and of course Vista you got UAC Virtualization -- which did allow you to keep the hard-coded directory names and have the system automagically "correct" them to their proper locations for you (which frequently wasn't where you think they should be as it could depend on user context).
>... and then there's the "system" sub-directory in Windows -- in 16-bit days we had \Windows\system. The introduction of Win32 gave us \Windows\system32 for the newer 32-bit stuff. Then 64-bit comes around and \windows\system32 is where 64-bit stuff goes, and 32-bit stuff goes into \windows\syswow64. I'm afraid to ask what's going to happen if/when Windows goes 128-bit...


You remember the scenes in airplane and airplane 2 where people line looong way up to slap somebody ?
i frequently imagine the people responsible for putting 64bit in system32 on the receiving end.