Application not Launching from Mapped Root

Keywords: application not launching 

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Problem:

User is on a network, possibly Novell. W:\ is mapped to G:\winuser\userID (the path to Windows).

If the user tries to launch Windows from the mapped W:\ drive, then Windows runs, but the application will not run. A message is displayed that the "INI file is not found". If the user runs from the actual G:\WinUser\UserID then the application will run fine.

Answer:

This a kinda common bug in a few applications. What happens is this:

The application asks for Windows directory name:

Case 1	   It gets  -	W:\

Case 2	   It gets  -	G:\WINUSER\userID

Then it adds a backslash and its INI file name to it:

Case 1	   It gets  -	W:\\APP.INI

Case 2	   It gets  -	G:\WINUSER\userID\APP.INI

Well, you can see that in case 1, because it was not expecting a root directory, it built an invalid file name with two slashes in it, whereas with the other name, everything came out rosy.

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Article ID:   W13472

Filename:   App not Launching from Mapped Root.txt