Changing user name in windows results in lost settings

[TealDuck]

I just spent 45 minutes troubleshooting this, so I thought I would share. The developers of this application made the idiotic decision to place the user name in a directory name where the binaries for the program exists.

Forget that we have an %APPDATA% designed for this purpose and the developers are currently using the CURRENT_USER hive in the registry for most of the data anyways. Why this directory even exists boggles my mind.

Anyways, if it happens to you. Here is the solution:
1. Close all instances PL/SQL Developer.
2. Go to where the program is installed (e.g. "C:\Program Files\PLSQL Developer")
3. In that directory change to the sub-directory "Preferences".
4. You should see another directory with your old user name, change that directory to your new user name.

 

[Hilarion]

It's not entirely true that PL/SQL Developer will always store all your preferences in the program folder. Some setting go to user registry hive, some go into user profile folder. If a user has no rights to access/store setting in the program folder, then the program stores those in the user profile folder.

If you want to force PL/SQL Developer to always store user preferences file in the user profile folder, then what you can do is to edit the "params.ini" file before first use of the PL/SQL Developer and add something like this to it:

prefpath=%APPDATA%\PLSQL Developer\Preferences\
defaultprefpath=C:\Program Files (x86)\PLSQL Developer\Preferences\Default\

The first line will force PL/SQL Developer to use user profile folder to store user preferences. Unfortunately it also causes it do store default preferences there (so each system user has separate default preferences). The second line fixes that (it should match your PL/SQL Developer installation location).