What
On Windows, Claude Code reads where your profile folders live. This read sits behind offering the machine's tools to cloud sessions, which are sessions running on Anthropic's machines that can use tools on your computer. Before, it only found the Documents folder, through PowerShell's $PROFILE and the registry value "Personal".
- It now also reads the registry's User Shell Folders values "AppData", "Local AppData", "Start Menu", "Programs" and "Startup". It uses
reg.exeand falls back to a single PowerShell script. - The
APPDATAandLOCALAPPDATAenvironment variables and ProgramData's Start Menu are added to the set. - More environment variables are filled in when reading registry values (
USERNAME,APPDATA,LOCALAPPDATA). - A missing value ("absent") is now told apart from one that could not be resolved ("unplaceable"). Before, an unresolvable value was a failure.
- Folders missing on disk are looked up again, and errors are caught. If the read fails, the machine's tools are not offered to cloud sessions until the next start, and a log such as "Could not read where this machine keeps its profile folders" is written.
- Separately, on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) a new check compares two paths through their Windows drive mounts, and a guard against alias paths now uses a helper instead of a fixed
.volcheck.
Why
If your Windows profile folders have been moved or redirected, offering this machine's tools to cloud sessions should fail less often. When the read does fail, it is logged and handled instead of breaking outright.
Something disagreesSomething we can check disagrees with this entry, or the writer said they could not settle it.
The writer flagged doubt
What the extra folders are used for once found is not known.