Where does Delphi get value the BDSCOMMONDIR from?

Question

One of my systems has a broken Delphi installation: it thinks BDSCOMMONDIR points to C:\\Windows\\system32\\9.0 whereas on a functioning system, it

Answer 1

I now had access to a system with Delphi 2007 showing similar symptoms for which I used RegAlyzer to verify.

By default, Delphi 2007 uses the SYSTEM setting of the environment variable from the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment

It never gets the value from the USER environment variable key in the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Environment

An override is stored by Delphi 2007 (which is BDS version 5.0) under this key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Borland\BDS\5.0\Environment Variables

All three keys store regular REG_SZ name/value pairs (where name is BDSCOMMONDIR).

My guess (I hope to eventually verify this) is that newer Delphi versions have similar behaviour because of backward compatibility.