kpathsea problem

[Erik Frambach]

> 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.

Does it work on NT? That is surprising. My experience is that DOS and
DOS-alikes (Win3,Win9x,WinNT) will not stumble on double backslashes
in paths, *unless* they appear right after the colon. So this will not work:
  dir c:\\
but
  dir c:\winnt\\fonts
will work. I guess this is just one of those features...

Erik