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Moving "Special Folders" and the USERPROFILE variable
On a laptop running Windows 10 Home I tried moving the special folder "Videos" to another location, by clicking on the folder's Location tab in Properties, and using the Move button. It appeared to work fine, but I noticed one odd thing: Before the relocation, if I typed the following at a command prompt:
cd %USERPROFILE%\Videos
Explorer would open to the Videos folder. If I run the same command now, it tells me "the system cannot find the path specified." Of course this is because %USERPROFILE% still points to its original location under C:\Users\[username].
1. Is this behavior involving the environment variable normal?
2. If so, how do programs know where to store videos if Windows can't find %USERPROFILE%\Videos?
Background: I'm trying to figure this out because I'm trying to diagnose a problem on a desktop machine which I just upgraded from Win 7 Pro to Win 10 Pro. I am seeing duplicate special folders under my username. I assume this has something to do with the fact that in the past I had relocated them to a different drive. I know I could try to get rid of the duplicates by restoring them to their default location and then moving them again, but first I want to understand what's going on with the environment variables.
Thanks!