Update: see
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=70596.msg1397177#msg1397177TL;DR: Download the binaries in the 7-zip at the bottom of the post, and try them on as many windows computers as possible (especially fs2_open_detect_home.exe as it doesn't require any game data to work).I have implemented detect_home() for the windows, so that now it doesn't just return the working directory, but rather returns the correct Application Data directory per user.
Thus on Vista and 7 the fs2_open_test_home.exe should show two message boxes with something like
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming.
On Windows XP it should show
C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Application Data.
This code should work on all windows platforms all the way back to Win98, which is what I need help with. I don't have a machine that has Windows 98 on it, so anyone that does, please
at least run the fs2_open_test_home.exe on it and report back what it reports. fs2_open_test_home.exe does
not require any freespace related game data to run (the binary has been broken so that it will only do the message boxes). But because it is still a freespace binary
OpenAL must be installed or you will still get the OpenAL error.
Otherwise if you don't have a Windows 98 machine, please test both the fs2_open and fred2_open binaries to make sure that nothing has been broken. You can run fs2_open_test_home.exe if you like or are having trouble with the other two binaries to see what the path is that detect_home is trying to use.
These are built against .13 trunk, and have the same code as the
28 Jul 2010 - Revision 6329 - Nightly except for detect_home patch.
A 7-zip with all of the three binaries can be found here:
http://www.box.net/shared/gvpjdsvkbk