HOME environment variable used on Windows systems

[simonk]

I am not sure if this might be by design:

If you set the environment variable HOME, Virtual Box will use this folder as base to store settings and create virtual hard disks even though you are running on Windows.

[Klaus Espenlaub]

I fail to see anything wrong with such behavior, it looks flexible and user friendly to me. VirtualBox uses HOME if it's set USERPROFILE if it's set or as a final fallback %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%. Could you state explicitly what you consider a bug here?

[simonk]

In my case I have set the HOME variable to my MSYS home folder and was surprised when I saw VirtualBox creating a VHD in there. I did not expect any Windows application making use of the HOME variable.

I would consider this to be more of a usability issue than a bug though.

[Frank Mehnert]

We changed our mind. As of VBox 4.3.22, the HOME environment variable is no longer respected on Windows.

[tkvb]

This explains why all of a sudden I lost all my VB settings, %HOME% is now getting ignored. Perhaps such changes should not be made in minor releases and instead they should be reserved for more major upgrades, I upgraded from .20 to .22 and all my settings were gone.