I have been working the past few weeks on making Processing run off of a flash drive, with no dependencies on the host machine, at all.

I was wondering, is there a way to force Processing to store the preferences.txt and the "scrapbook" files on the flash drive, rather than:

"C:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\Processsing"
and
C:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\My Documents\Processing"?

You should look at the Commander class (not too sure how to use it...).

You should be able to override the default settings by carefully editing the file <processing>\lib\preferences.txt. This is like a master preferences file. The relevant part for you is a quarter of the way down the file:

Code:

# if you don't want settings to go into "application data" on windows
# and "library" on macosx, set this to the alternate location.
#settings.path=data 

I haven't tried this, but in theory you can take the following steps:

1. Copy your entire processing folder to your portable drive.
2. Copy your user folder's preferences.txt to somewhere new on the portable drive.
3. Edit the portable drives's <processing>\lib\preferences.txt, by uncommenting that settings.path line and replacing "data" with the path to the portable copy of your user folder's preferences.txt file.
4. Save the file. Don't worry about the other settings, as they can be changed in the PDE.
5. Start the PDE from the portable drive, and change those other settings such as sketchbook location.
6. Remember to backup everything before even attempting any of the above.