Gordon writes,
But there's no $HOME as such.
There's HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\S hell Folders with around 16 subkeys, including AppData (which on my system has one entry installed by a program I've never used and didn't know I had). But MSOffice uses the Personal subkey. Others seem to use the Desktop subkey.
SHGetSpecialFolderPath(,,CSIDL_APPDATA,) would be the current 'MS preferred' method for this as it allows roaming (not that I've ever seen roaming work). If Unix code expects $HOME to be per machine (and so used to store, for example, window locations which are dependent on screen resolution) then CSIDL_LOCAL_APPDATA would be a better choice. To make these work on 9x and NT 4 Microsoft provides a redistributable Shfolder.dll. Fred writes,
Look at your $HOME on Unix box; most of the dotfiles are *files*, not directories, and that's all most applications need;
This may have been the case in the past and for people who understand Unix well enough to maintain it, but for us just-want-it-to-run folks, its no longer true. I formatted my Linux partition this week and installed Red Hat 6.2 and Gnome 1.2 and then used a few applications. The dot directories outnumber the dot files 18 to 16. Neil