Big Heads Up On Changing the Program Files, Users, or ProgramData directory... After I did this using Windows Admin Kit (WAIK), I had nothing but problems. After days of chasing it down, I found a Microsoft KB article that states this functionality is BROKEN!! If you change any of these directories, then Vista forgets to update the junction points. This will leave you with junctions pointing to non-existant directories and your life will be a miserable slog! I have tried to manually fix the junctions and/or the Vista image, but its beyond my ability. There is no junction viewing utility with Vista, and the existing freeware ones do not work correctly with Vista. Vista added new types of links and ALL of the existing apps break badly except for junction.exe that comes from sysinternals. PLUS, get this, there are a few places in the registry that still refer to the old locations. MS NEVER TESTED THIS AT ALL! What a turd So, my advice is to wait for the vLite version that supports this, if it ever is done. Lastly, just to demonstrate how bad this is broken... Vista creates two env. variables, %PROGRAMDATA% and %SYSTEMROOT%. Ok, no problem. When you use WAIK, the %PROGRAMDATA% var is correctly updated, but several inf files have incorrect references in them. Most inf references are of the form %PROGRAMDATA%\DirectoryName ... However some are %SYSTEMDRIVE%%PROGRAMDATA%\DirectoryName Thus if, for example, you have %SYSTEMDRIVE%=C:\ and %PROGRAMDATA%=C:\ABC. then the computed directory is: C:\C:\ABC note the double drive letter... IF you omit the C: from the %PROGRAMDATA% var, then the other references break.. Like many others, I would REALLY like to move these locations but the KB article indicates that moving these locations is broken and will prevent you from upgrading (they dont say how) Hope this helps someone out there...
