[Rd] Question on help system under windows

[Berwin A Turlach]

G'day all,

I spend today sometime playing around with R under Windows since our
lecturing starts in 2 weeks again and our IT guys want to know which
version to put onto our lab machines.

I noticed the following:

Under R-2.2.1, I obtain the following output:
      > R.home()
      [1] "C:\\PROGRA~1\\R\\R-22~1.1"
and if I run "help.start()" under R, I obtain a file "fixedHTMLlinks"
in packages that are not installed in the standard library with entry:
      file:///C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-22~1.1
And the index help page of such a package is updated such that it has
links like: 
      file:///C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-22~1.1/doc/html/logo.jpg
in it.  So this seems all to be fine.

However, when I install R-2.2.1 patched, I get the following output:
      > R.home()
      [1] "C:\\PROGRA~1\\R\\R-22~1.1PA"
and if I run "help.start()" under R, I obtain a file "fixedHTMLlinks"
(needless to say, I deleted the previous file before running
help.start) in packages that are not installed in the standard library
with entry: 
      file:///C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-22~1.1PA
Which seems also correct.  However, the index help page of such a
package, although its modification time was the time help.start() was
run, still has links like:
      file:///C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-22~1.1/doc/html/logo.jpg
in it.  This, of course, stopped working when I un-installed R-2.2.1
and only kept R-2.2.1 patched.  

Do I have a misconception of what help.start() is doing?  Or is this a
bug?

Moreover, these machines still have R-2.2.0 installed, when I started
R-2.2.0, I got the output:
      > R.home()
      [1] "C:\\PROGRA~1\\R\\R-22~1.0"
and running help.start() creates "fixedHTMLlinks" with entry:
      file:///C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-22~1.0
Also, during my test the index help page of such a package was changed
to have links like:
      file:///C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-22~1.0/doc/html/logo.jpg

However, when I wanted to discuss these findings with our IT person
(at which time I had deinstalled R-2.2.1 and R-2.2.1 patched),
everytime we run help.start() from R-2.2.0, the modification dates of
the html files changed, but the links were still of the type:
     file:///C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-22~1.1/doc/html/logo.jpg
So we were completely baffled why R-2.2.0 would write an R-2.2.1 link
into these files. (???)

To make things more complicated, those packages are not only not in
the standard library, but the library they are in is on another drive
(the network drive).  We couldn't get compiled html help working for
such packages at all under any of the recent versions of R.  I looked
into the manuals, FAQ, RSiteSearch() &c for information about compiled
help, but couldn't find anything that described how to get compiled
help working for packages in a library that is on another drive than R
is.  So our question is also whether this is possible?

Thanks for any advice that you might be able to offer.

Cheers,

        Berwin