PuTTY semi-bug win-randseed-location

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summary: PuTTY's placement of PUTTY.RND is non-optimal on Windows
class: semi-bug: This might or might not be a bug, depending on your precise definition of what a bug is.
difficulty: fun: Just needs tuits, and not many of them.
priority: high: This should be fixed in the next release.
fixed-in: 2007-01-10 r7082 (0.59) (0.60)

PuTTY attempts to store its random number seed file PUTTY.RND in a sensible place (such as the user's home directory), as described in the FAQ.

However, we've had various reports that this isn't working as designed, and that PUTTY.RND is ending up in C:\. This has been reported on Windows 2000 and XP.

Suggested alternative from 001201c32fd3$8c5484a0$bc1eb440@hyperwolf: use one of the paths returned by SHGetFolderPath. (To use this function with the maximal range of old Windows versions, considerable faffing is required - full horrors in 200310180552.h9I5qHZ21748@cs.auckland.ac.nz.)

(If this is fixed, we should continue to support reading the files from their old locations.)

Update, 2006-11-08: it's been suggested that this might stop PuTTY running as a standard user in Windows Vista. Bumped priority.

Update, 2007-01-09: we now consider keeping PUTTY.RND in a path returned from SHGetFolderPath() on reasonably modern versions of Windows.

Audit trail for this semi-bug.

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(last revision of this bug record was at 2007-01-09 23:47:15 +0000)