[Tutor] Get me out of the blue (help urgently needed!)

[Scott Widney]

Sorry to jump into this so late (I've been off for a few days).

> At the same time Python seems to report this to ... hmmm ... to whom?
> (Also annoying! I'd like to be informed about messages going from my
> computer to whomever ... Whoever it may be, the addressee will not be
> happy with error messages like this. )

Beside what has already been mentioned, another possibility is that Windows
2000 might be invoking its error reporting dialog box. It used to be that it
was only launched when a Microsoft product died, but now it seems any
crashed application will bring it up. If a dialog box popped up giving you
the chance to report or not send information about the erro, then it
probably was a Microsoft "feature".

> I tried to use regedit to search for "home" in the registry of both
> installations, without success. (I am NOT an experienced user of
> regedit!)

In regedit, look under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Environment. You probably have a
REG_SZ or REG_EXPAND_SZ value named HOME. Some applications use the %HOME%
environment variable as a base path for storing configuration information,
temp files, etc. You are safe setting it to any directory that exists. Since
you have Windows 2000 installed on H:, why not set HOME to H:\ ?

As an aside, the other two variables that Danny mentions (HOMEDRIVE &
HOMEPATH) are mostly used in corporate networks. In a User Profile, you can
specify that a drive letter be mapped to a network location and this
location is "home". As an example, say it was set with F: =
"\\server\sharename\path\to\profiles". When that account logs on, three
network environment variables are created. %HOMESHARE% is set to
"\\server\sharename" and %HOMEPATH% to "\path\to\profiles". The F: drive
gets mapped to the concatenation: %HOMESHARE%%HOMEPATH%. And then
%HOMEDRIVE% is set to "F:". The network environment variables can be
overridden by the user by creating a user environment variable named HOME,
which can point to any arbitrary (but existing) location.

> I don't understand how this comes? I have no environment
> variable HOME defined on both installations - or I don't know
> how to locate them, if they are created automatically.
> I don't even understand, why win2000, installed in H:
> searches for something in C: ?

Most Windows applications these days store their configuration information
in the Registry. That's why you don't come across this very often. Python,
being multi-platform, uses the closest thing Windows provides to ~ which is
%HOME%


I hope this has helped.
Scott