ANN: Vista "Gotchas" You Should Know About

[J. Landman Gay]

Ken Ray wrote:
> 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.

Some of the info I found suggested these last two were only writable at 
installation, and after that were read-only. Is that true? One would 
think the AppData folders would be the natural place to put files, but 
someone was commenting they had to use Documents because AppData 
couldn't be written to.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com