startup with .octaverc on Windows Vista

[Bart Vandewoestyne]

Hello,

One of our sysadmins installed Octave 3.2.2 on Windows Vista so
that we can use it as a Matlab replacement for our student's
laboratory sessions.

I went to test the setup today, and i figured out that the
.octaverc file did not get read from the student's H:-drive,
which is the network drive containing their home directory.

I noticed that the HOME environment variable is not set, but the
HOMEDRIVE points to C: and HOMEPATH to \Users\myusername

So if i place the .octaverc file in C:\Users\myusername then it
gets read.  So i can ask students each time they login, to copy
the .octaverc file to C:\Users\myusername but that seems
annoying.  It would be better if they only created .octaverc
once in their H:-drive homedirectory.  So therefore, we will have
to make sure that Octave searches for the .octaverc file in the
H:\ path.  While googling, i found

http://www.nabble.com/Home-directory-in-octave-on-windows--td23772097.html

and it seems like there exist several environment variables that
are candidates, namely:

1) HOME

2) HOMEDRIVE + HOMEPATH

3) USERPROFILE

My questions are:

1) What environment variables does Octave read and use to search
for an .octaverc file?

2) Considering that I am looking for a clean and long-term solution,
   what would be the best environment variable to use on Windows
   Vista?

Thanks for any advice,
Bart

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        "Share what you know.  Learn what you don't."