> when the senior developers don't know how environment variables work, I weep
I recently spent a hair-pulling near-week encountering then trying to figure out the DLL search path in Win32 because a library was messing around with it. Documentation is straightforward enough, I suppose, until you get to SetDefaultDllDirectories, which has this in its discussion: "It is not possible to revert to the standard DLL search path or remove any directory specified with SetDefaultDllDirectories from the search path."
I guess my point is, environment variables can be tricky.