R help - Apr 2004 - getting R 1.8 or 1.9 to work!?

I've had a interesting day with R; can anyone offer any advice?

First with R 1.8.1. on XP Pro:

"R for Windows GUI front-end has encountered a problem and needs to close.
We are sorry for the inconvenience."

I then tried installing 1.9.0. and got the "information" dialogue:

"Fatal error: INVALID HOMEDRIVE"

instead of a functioning R!

I attempted to set HOMEPATH via XP user accounts and advanced...-  but all I
still have is the following:

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:\>set home
HOMEDRIVE=C:
HOMESHARE=\\concol\concol$

, and the startup directory is the standard "C:\Program
Files\R\rw1090"?

Help would be most welcome!

It's a bug in windows critical update KB835732.
cheers
Brett


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Duncan Murdoch" <dmurdoch at pair.com>
To: "Brett Melbourne" <bamelbourne at ucdavis.edu>
Cc: <r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch>
Sent: Monday, April 26, 2004 10:20 AM
Subject: Re: [R] Bug? (Fatal error: INVALID HOMEDRIVE)

> 
> I put up a little web page
> 
> http://www.murdoch-sutherland.com/HOMEPATH.html
> 
> describing this bug in KB835732.  Can you let me know if your
> experience with it matches my description?  
> 
> For newcomers reading this, the symptoms are that R fails to start.
> In version 1.9.0 the error message is usually "Fatal Error: INVALID
> HOMEDRIVE".  The patched version of 1.9.0 can deal with the bug; the
> workaround in earlier ones is to put something like "R_USER=c:/"
on
> the command line that starts R.
> 
> Duncan Murdoch