The Gnu Emacs for Windows distribution appears to be pretty good at inferring where a reasonable place for $HOME is, straight out of the box. In my case, said reasonable place was %USERPROFILE%/AppData/Roaming which was an entirely acceptable default.

That is, until several other tools entered the picture and disagreed with Emacs. We’ve recently switched to using git at work and the git ecosystem  needed to have some ideas where its home was. I’m using Git Extensions as the “regular” Windows GUI and TortoiseGit for the Windows Explorer integration, plus the awesome Posh-Git that even made me learn basic PowerShell.