I accidentally walked myself into an interesting corner recently. I noticed that every version of VisualWorks I use on my laptop (running Windows XP) thought its home directory was C:\vw7.4.1. I spent time searching the registry, but that didn't turn up anything helpful. Finally, Bob Westergaard, one of our engineers, reminded me that I might be picking up an environment variable. Sure enough: when I opened a DOS prompt and typed "Set", I saw the setting.

I had completely forgotten how or when I had set that, but Bob pointed me to the System properties tool in Windows. That's where things got confusing. Here's what I saw when I opened that up and checked the Environment:

Notice the lack of any setting for VISUALWORKS. This gave me pause, but hey - this is Windows, weird crap happens. So I set the variable, hit "Ok". came back in, cleared the variable, hit "Ok". Problem solved, with some Windows oddness tossed in.