Windows Vista forgets my PATH environment variable on reboot

Clayton Arends

I know it has been a while since your initial post on this topic. My
hope is that you are still monitoring this thread. I have the same
problem with my system. Vista keeps forgetting my path or at least
certain parts of the path. I have been having the problem for the
last three days but only today realized that my path was to blame. In
my case Vista will sometimes forget the path when it's woken up from
sleep and not just on reboots.

If you have solved your problem I would love to know the answer. In
case you haven't solved it I have included my configuration to see if
we may have some similarities.

I am a program developer. In my case I have some other system
variables set up and use those system variables in the path. For
instance:

SRC = C:\MyCompany\Source

This would be the base path to my source files. Beneath the base
source directory I have some common DLLs that I use during
development. So, the PATH variable contains in it entries such as
this:

%SRC%\DLLs
%SRC%\Scripts
... etc ...

The odd thing is that if I drop to the Command Prompt and echo %PATH%
all of the entries are there. But attempting to run a script I get
the "is not recognized as an internal or external command" message.

Vista hasn't forgotten my environment variables because I can run a
script file by typing the following:

%SRC%\Scripts\scriptname

The next time Vista forgets my path I will check and see if it has
only forgotten certain entries in the path or if the entire path is
shot.

- Clayton