kpathsea problem

[Fabrice Popineau]

It turned out that under w9x, kpathsea fails to behave correctly when
the whole system is at the root of some drive. More precisely,
w9x does not recognize c://texmf/web2c (by example) as a directory,
even using native win32 calls. This is a bit annoying because this means
the TL4a cd won't run without adding TEXMFMAIN and TEXMFCNF 
variables.

So, my request. There is a test release of :
ftp://ftp.ese-metz.fr/pub/tex/win32-beta/test/kpathsea.dll

Anybody using w9x that can test it and report about it will be
welcome. There are 2 ways (without burning a cd) helpful
for this testing :
- using a share \\server\TeX with bin and texmf under the share
- using subst to simulate an installation at the root of some drive.

I have  not changed anything wrt to kpathsea for quite a long time and
did not intend to do it, but this is enough serious to deserve a fix for 
a forthcoming TL4b that might appear in some book.

Thanks in advance,

Fabrice