CHENG Gao wrote:
> *On Wed, 20 Sep 2006 21:58:48 -0400
> * Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> climbed out of the dark hell and cried out:
>
>   
>> Emacs ought to recognize ~/.emacs.d/init.el, on any system, when it does
>> not find .emacs.  If this does not work on Windows, it is a bug.
>> Could you confirm that that is what is happening to you?
>>     
>
> I use ~/.emacs.d/init.el under M$ Windoze and MacOSX, thus I can put all
> Emacs related setting files in one ./emacs.d/ file. I confirm this works
> well under two OSes above mentioned.
>   

The case found by the original poster is when $HOME is not set in the 
environment. In Emacs 22 we default to the user specific APPDATA system 
directory, but we first check that C:\.emacs and C:\_emacs do not exist, 
in case the user used a previous version of  Emacs that defaulted to 
C:\. The original poster had created C:\.emacs.d\init.el, but we do not 
check for this file when deciding whether to default to the old HOME 
location, since it is only supported since Emacs 22.