Wrong user.home?

Ever wondered why Eclipse (or any Java app) is still pointing to your old Windows profile (eg. after renaming or copying it)? It’s a known JRE bug. They use a Windows registry entry for setting the user.home property.

I just had that upps effect with RSSOwl. All my blogs were gone after removing the old profile dir which I haven’t used for months (I moved out of a Windows domain severel weeks ago).

3 thoughts on “Wrong user.home?

  1. I remember in Windows user.home is actually desktop\.., that is the parent directory of your Windows Desktop directory, not %USERPROFILE%, especially when you’ve moved your Windows Desktop to a personalized location.

    And it’s been a long time like this.

  2. Thanks for this post Gunnar. It finally enabled me to work out why the ANT builds on two of our developers’ machines suddenly failed when we moved roaming profiles whereas everybody else was ok.

    Good to see that this has been open with Sun since 2002 and is still an issue in 2009. Nice one Sun.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.