On one PC we are getting a message that PDFX is trying to write its temp file to the H:\ drive, which is a removable drive with nothing in it, causing a "device not ready". I have disabled the drive and it still tried to write to it, although with a different message (drive doesn't exist).

I can't see why it is choosing the H:\ drive. %TEMP% and other environment variables are set to usual values as far as I can see.

The issue here isn't so much PDFX as APEX, which needs a location to write it's temporary file, which is determined by the first success in the following search list:

1. APEX environment variable. (We added this option specifically to deal with mysterious problems like this. And for what it's worth, it was your colleague who have instigated it, and possibly set it programmatically using AG_SETENV, as suggested by this post.)

2. <My Documents>\APEX, as determined by the registry setting...

\\HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders\Personal

Apparently this one is the culprit in your case, but it's hard to come up with an explanation of why or how it would have been set to the H: drive.

3. %TEMP%\APEX

Mmmm why do changes made years ago still come back and bite, glad you have a good memory Jack! Maybe it's AG_SETENV but still not sure how they set it to H:\
Abyway everything you pointed out above is something to go on, Thanks.

Actually my memory isn't so great, but I'm good at searching through the forum, emails, the doc, etc. Without those resources I'd be lost.

Also note that independent of figuring out the historical cause of the current settings, if nothing else you can just query the current APEX environment variable with AG_GETENV and reset it with AG_SETENV. Ideally you'd let it default to the \APEX folder, since otherwise the question becomes where else to put it. But a couple of alternative possibilities would be in the PERMCACHE\APEX directory, or in %TEMP%\APEX.

well well well i did write a FN'SETAPEX'FOLDER$() function in our Login Routine back in June 2009 and it reads a system INI file. But in this customers case its not set (whats no surprise as im sure it was done for just one customer)

But could be handy and we sure the future! and ill try to set it to APEX FOLDER=%MIAME%\cache

Thanks for the help Jack. As it turns out everyone at this company has an H:\ drive that should be mapped to a server location and this user's is not working. The H:\ drive is set to their "My Documents" on their PCs.

For some reason it took them until this morning to remember this, sorry for making you look!