problem migrating to ver. 23.1

["B. T. Raven" <nihil@nihilo.net>]

Because of conflicts using HOME environment variable I am running ver. 
23.1 (w32 on msw2000) from a batch file with the 2 lines:

HOME=C:\emacs-23.1
c:\emacs-23.1\bin\runemacs --debug-init

Even though I have commented out all references to ucs or ucs-tables 
from the ver. 23.1 .emacs file, reading of this init file aborts with 
this backtrace:

"
Debugger entered--Lisp error: (file-error "Cannot open load file" 
"ucs-tables")
   require(ucs-tables)
   mapc(require (ucs-tables))
   custom-theme-set-variables(user (TeX-PDF-mode t) 
(TeX-output-view-style (quote (... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 
... ... ...)))

[...]

(w32-list-proportional-fonts t))
   eval-buffer(#<buffer  *load*> nil "c:/emacs/.emacs" nil t)  ; Reading 
at buffer position 18084
   load-with-code-conversion("c:/emacs/.emacs" "c:/emacs/.emacs" t t)
   load("~/.emacs" t t)
   #[nil "\b
"

Instead of loading the .emacs in C:\emacs-23.1, the ver. 22.3 .emacs is 
loaded, even though the HOME is supposed to be changed. Also, M-! set 
shows "home=C:\emacs". What am I not understanding?
The last time something like this worked for me I was using msw98 which 
had true DOS shell ability. Under 2000 do I have run 22.3 and 23.1 as 2 
separate users in order to have 2 independent versions of .emacs?

Ed