TenBrink Tech Technology | Life

Fun with PowerShell / .net and redirected home directories

I'm on day three of my new position and have been diligently getting my new computer set up to operate in a way that I need it to run to do my job. Part of that setup included installing PowerShell. PowerShell (both 1.0 and 2.0) rely on the .NET 2.0 Framework, which came pre-installed and configured on my company-built notebook computer.

When I attempted to run PowerShell, the application would crash with no apparent errors, other than a non-descriptive Windows Error Reporting dialog with no details.

I did the natural thing, and jumped into the event log. First stop was the PowerShell event log which showed nothing special about the startup and then the shutdown of the PowerShell providers. The system log did not show anything out of place either. However, the application log had this error entry:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: .NET Runtime
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1023
Description:
.NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.1433 - Absolute path information is required.

Curious, I did the natural thing and searched Google while ran a repair on the .NET 2.0 install. All my searching yielded not a snippet of help. I did notice though that my home directory had been redirected to a shared drive on the personal storage SAN while working in Word. I wondered if that had something to do with my error, and sure enough, it did.

Upon further examination, the redirection for "My Documents" (Windows XP) was set to "Z:". A quick change of this to "Z:\" (note the trailing backslash?) corrected the issue. How to change this quickly? Right click on the "My Documents" folder on your desktop or Start Menu. From that properties dialog, you can change the storage location for that special folder.

Problem solved, back to writing scripts.

Oh, and work here is fun. The company treats its employees like people, which is a kind change from most corporations. We're still in the honeymoon period and working on grand new ideas on how to revitalize the IT juices around here. Exciting times lay ahead.