OpenVPN Install and the Windows Path Environment variable

[Samuli Seppänen]

On Windows XP (and possibly newer Windows operating systems), the OpenVPN installation process creates a Path variable in the User section of Environmental variables by default; for deployment purposes, I would suggest this to be unwise. OpenVPN has been flawless for me with the USER Path addition, but adding a variable named "Path" in the user section will cause some other applications to loose their ability to look up the SYSTEM Path for needed files such as dynamic library links and executives. The Path variable in the User section overrides the System Path for some applications, including the Windows Security Center. If OpenVPN should have a Path entry, it should be appended to the SYSTEM Path and not the USER Path. The issue is not a bug to the OpenVPN software itself, but only to the Install package.

The average Windows user probably will not understand why some of their other software is not behaving well due to a simple Path addition of the Users section, which could cause blame to OpenVPN affecting other installed software (but is not the case).

[Samuli Seppänen]

This was posted to the SF.net bug tracker by somebody (anonymous).

[Samuli Seppänen]

The win/setpath.nsi is to blame here. I'll see if it could be modified or replaced as suggested by the bug reporter.

[Samuli Seppänen]

This problems seem to have been fixed at some point. At least on Windows 2012r2 OpenVPN's bin directory is added to system path, not to usre path. I have not heard of any other reports of this, so I suspect there is no problem on Wndows XP, either. Plus even if there were, we have already dropped active support for Windows XP in OpenVPN 2.4.