Re: [Ethereal-users] RE: User profile dir on versions of Win 9x

[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jan 08, 2002 at 10:46:18AM +0100, Morel Olivier FRF wrote:
> Just keep in mind the following architectural design of various flavours of
> Windows : 
> 
> Win NT 4.0 and following (2000 & XP)  are multi-users environments. 
> User profiles are stored in Winnt\Profiles\user-name.  
> 
> Win 9X (95, 98, me) are MONO USER environments. 
> Thus no specific user profile directory, since there ought to be a single
> one.  
> 
> Do not be fooled by Microsoft marketing people naming all "Windows" what are
> actually two completely different lines of operating systems... 

Hence my use of "Windows OT" (95, 98, Me) and "Windows NT" (NT 3.x, NT
4.0, W2K, WXP).

However, there *are* mechanisms for logging into Windows OT, and there
*is* an "SHGetFolderPath()" for Windows OT, and it *does* support
CSIDL_APPDATA, at least according to the Microsoft documentation I've
seen, so presumably it does *something* to give you a path for an
"application data" directory.  (Consider, for example, a home computer
shared by more than one person in the household; having multiple
profiles could be useful there.)

I suspect the "C:\Windows\Profiles\<user name>" directory somebody saw
on Windows OT, although it may have been created by an application, had
its pathname constructed by "SHGetFolderPath()", by analogy to the
Windows NT 4.0 "\WINNT\Profiles\<user name>" (W2K puts profile
directories under "\Documents and Settings" unless you've upgraded from
NT 4.0 to W2K).

> Windows XP should be the convergence OS Microsoft has kept on promising for
> the past 10 years...
> but it still comes with two versions Professional (= NT 5.1) and Personal.  
> Is it actually the convergence version or yet another marketing cloud ? 

>From everthing I've heard, Windows XP is NT 5.1 regardless of whether
it's the Personal or Professional version (and the same is probably true
of Windows .NET Server or whatever the server version will be called).