>>I agree (as you might expect). The only thing I'd say is that any process (outside of Windows) that fools with this environment variable should be immediately relegated to the "bit-bucket". There are a lot of "ill-behaved" programs out there, but this would take that phrase to a different level of meaning< g >.
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>Agreed, but it's often accidental. For example, both CreateProcess() and ShellExecuteEx() have the ability to define a new environment name space to pass to a child process. Not everyone reads the docs, and they don't realize that you have to load the entire environment namespace; the new environment, if specified, is not passed with along with the new one...

Especially those folks who write drivers for a particular brand of very popular printers (which will be left unnamed)< bg >. I think you could also add sheer carelessness to that reason though. I've been studying C++ lately, and from what I've read, it's very easy to inadvertantly do something like this, or cause a memory leak. Especially if the wrong destructor's called, which is very easy to do if you get the slight bit careless.