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 points to C:\Users\Public\Documents\RAD Studio\9.0.

I'm probably the victim of corporate security madness, as I found out nobody can access the C:\Users\Public directory on the failing system anyway.

What I want is to move the content of the directory to a place where the developers can write, then globally (a subdirectory C:\ProgramData comes to mind) and globally set the BDSCOMMONDIR.

So: where does Delphi get the BDSCOMMONDIR value from?
How can I override it?

The major reason why it is holding me back is that I now get this on every compile/build I try:

[MakeDir Error] Unable to create directory "C:\Windows\system32\9.0\hpp\". Access to the path 'C:\Windows\system32\9.0\hpp\' is denied.
[MakeDir Error] Unable to create directory "C:\Windows\system32\9.0\Dcp". Access to the path 'C:\Windows\system32\9.0\Dcp' is denied.
[MakeDir Error] Unable to create directory "C:\Windows\system32\9.0\hpp". Access to the path 'C:\Windows\system32\9.0\hpp' is denied.

Answer 1

You can go to

Tools|Options|Environment Options|Environmental Variables

double click on

BDSCOMMONDIR

and set it to whatever you want.

Also get a look at Where are environment variables stored in registry?

Answer 2

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.