Comment 4 for bug 1563632

A nice helpful person over at PortableApps provided a solution that should be trivial (see Step 2 below) to implement into the codebase. It definitely solves the problem for ZimWiki application and it might solve the problem for any reasonably well-behaved (i.e. *NOT* hard-coded) plugins.

NOTE: If I knew how to read Python code better (total Py novice) I might be willing to try and figure out where this particular INI file is built.

The solution is as follows:

0. Close and EXIT ZimWiki.

1. Find the ZimDesktopWikiPortable.INI file. Mine was located at
 - F:\PortableApps\ZimDesktopWikiPortable\App\AppInfo\Launcher\ZimDesktopWikiPortable.INI

2. Make sure the [Environment] section has at least the following 4 lines at the top:
<code>
[Environment]
HOME=%PAL:DataDir%
XDG_DATA_HOME=%PAL:DataDir%\Data
XDG_CACHE_HOME=%PAL:DataDir%\Cache
XDG_CONFIG_HOME=%PAL:DataDir%\Config
</code>

3. If you have any setting or plugins in the old %APPDATA% pathway you will need to bring them over manually to the new path or just reinstall/adjust them from scratch.

4. Start up ZimWiki and you should be good to go.

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SOURCE: http://portableapps.com/comment/229303#comment-229303