ANN: Vista "Gotchas" You Should Know About

[Ken Ray]

On Fri, 23 Feb 2007 19:52:59 -0500, Tariel Gogoberidze wrote:

> 
> On Feb 23, 2007, at 1:12 PM, Ken Ray <kray at sonsothunder.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hey everyone - I've been working with the release of Vista (Home
>> Premium Edition) since its release and just discovered something you
>> may or may not be aware of that you REALLY need to be aware of IF:
> 
> Ken, thanks for this info. Any solutions so far?
> I don't have Vista installed yet to look, may be you know if there is 
> some "designated" SpecialFolderPath accessible folder on Vista for 
> files / stacks that you need to write back without triggering 
> "VirtualStore",  even if "Account Control" is turned "On" ?

Well, so far what's been suggested so far is either:

CSIDL_COMMON_DOCUMENTS  (specialFolderPath(46))
C:/Users/Public/Documents

or

CSIDL_PERSONAL  (specialFolderPath(5))
C:/Users/Ken/Documents

depending on whether you want it available to everyone on the machine, 
or just the logged-in user. This is a visible place that normal users 
can get to if they need to (perhaps to toss out a preference file to 
start the app up with defaults). If you don't want people to be able to 
get to it easily, but still have it be a writeable area, you can use 
either:

CSIDL_COMMON_APPDATA  (specialFolderPath(35))
C:/ProgramData

or 

CSIDL_LOCAL_APPDATA  (specialFolderPath(28))
C:/Users/Ken/AppData/Local

once again depending on whether you want it for everyone or just the 
logged in user. These folders are writeable, but are kept hidden, so 
only people "in the know" will be able to get to files in those folders.

Ken