I think you missed the point of what was happening to me. I wanted to
explain why I had the problems I did in case other users have the same
issue in the future. Because my network admins had set homepath to
"connect", the homedrive was set to \\ and the homepath was set to
\\cbtusa\macvol\users\jgaskill\... which was a directory on a server that
I did not have sufficient rights to write to or did not exist in reality
at all. (I am not sure which is true since I do not have access to that
drive.) Because of this, the .ethereal directory could not be created
which in turn caused the various errors I was receiving. When I had my
admin change my homepath to local and c:\documents and settings\jgaskill,
everything started working because the directories specified existed and I
had proper permissions to write to that directory. My experience is that
most network admins are not as amenable to making changes like this as
mine were. Because of this, I felt the user should be able to specify
where the .ethereal directory was stored if the homedrive and homepath
specifications did not work.
In addition, I had a friend who does similar work to what I do and was
trying Ethereal at my suggestion. He did not get any errors when
launching Ethereal, but did get the same errors when he tried to save
filters. Because he was logging into the local domain for his server, his
homedrive and homepath were specified on the local drive. However, he had
yet another problem. The path specified under homepath (\users\ddavis),
did not exist. When he created this directory structure on his C drive,
filters started working with him.
The moral of the story is that not only should the path specified in
homepath be one that you can actually write to, but the path specified
under homepath must actually exist in order for the .ethereal directory
and filter files to be created.
However, this sounds like it may be a moot point since you (plural) are
changing where the .ethereal folder is stored in future versions of
Ethereal. UserProfile has always been set up correctly and when I type
set appdata=..., the value is held unlike homedrive and homepath. It
sounds like the new version would have worked on my system without a
problem.
Again, thanks for the assistance that both you and Richard provided. I
would not have been able to resolve this issue without the clues you two
provided. Ethereal makes certain problems very easy to identify that
would be difficult to identify with other sniffer packages that I use.
Jeanne
