The difficulty is that it should be cross platform. Windows 2000, XP, Vista, OSX, Linux, other unix variants. I am looking for a snippet of code that can accomplish this for
I would use the algorithm detailed in the bug report using System.getenv(String), and fallback to using the user.dir property if none of the environment variables indicated a valid existing directory. This should work cross-platform.
I think, under Windows, what you are really after is the user's notional "documents" directory.