special folders

[Sadhunathan Nadesan]

Greetings,

After reading the post below about the admin issues possible with 
specialFolderPath, I'd like to hear anyone expound on the justification 
for the use of 'special folders', if we have any pontiffs out there who 
advocate it.  Must be a good reason for it, yes?  Anyone care to 
enlighten me?  It's basically curiosity so feel free to ignore me also.

For example, in our case, we are providing a download of an executable 
for windows users which installs as normal in the program files 
directory. (Mac version, not sure where it goes).  However, a separate 
stack that can be written to is obscurely (some might say) squirreled 
away in a special folder - which turns out to be different on different 
versions of windoz.  For example, its under all users/application data 
(or something like that) on XP home and pro, and something like 
c:/ProgramData on Vista basic (at least mine).  The mac I'm not sure.  
Our code has a case statement to detect the type of OS and pick the 
right special folder. 

Why wouldn't we just put this stack in the same folder where we install 
the executable?

Wise ones, tell all!

Mahalo
Sadhu




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>>Using the altsplash auto-load architecture, I have one user for whom the 
>>loader hangs.  His specialFolderPath(35) returns as
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>>C:/Documents and Settings/All Users/Application Data
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>>but he says he has no such folder, which leads me guess is that it is 
>>hidden and that its invisibility is preventing the write to or the read 
>>from the directory.
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>Yup.  It's real and it is hidden - however if the user does not have Admin 
>rights he can't write there.   He needs to write to a folder belonging to 
>him.
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>C:/Documents and Settings/Your Users Name/Application Data.
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>>Is there something special I must do to make this directory usable if 
>>hidden?
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>You could instruct the user to elevate himself to an admin - while that will 
>work it may also be against any policies they are subject to and therefore 
>rendering "security" useless which probably is not a good idea.
>
>Scott Kane
>"Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start
>today and make a new ending." -- Maria Robinson 
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