On start-up of emacs, the .emacs file could not be loaded, because emacs
resolved the Windows HOME variable to *exactly* how it was defined. That
was the text %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%. Emacs could not resolve these two
variables. The workaround for me was to manually change the HOME
variable to the absolute path (and to resolve the two variables %HOMEDRIVE% and %HOMEPATH% and restart windows.



In GNU Emacs 24.5.1 (i686-pc-mingw32)
of 2015-04-11 on LEG570
Windowing system distributor `Microsoft Corp.', version 6.1.7601
Configured using:
`configure --prefix=/c/usr --host=i686-pc-mingw32'

Important settings:
  value of $LANG: DEU
  locale-coding-system: cp1252

Major mode: Fundamental

Minor modes in effect:
  tooltip-mode: t
  electric-indent-mode: t
  mouse-wheel-mode: t
  tool-bar-mode: t
  menu-bar-mode: t
  file-name-shadow-mode: t
  global-font-lock-mode: t
  blink-cursor-mode: t
  auto-composition-mode: t
  auto-encryption-mode: t
  auto-compression-mode: t
  buffer-read-only: t
  line-number-mode: t
  transient-mark-mode: t

Recent messages:
For information about GNU Emacs and the GNU system, type C-h C-a.

Load-path shadows:
None found.

Features:
(shadow sort gnus-util mail-extr emacsbug message format-spec rfc822 mml
easymenu mml-sec mm-decode mm-bodies mm-encode mail-parse rfc2231
mailabbrev gmm-utils mailheader sendmail rfc2047 rfc2045 ietf-drums
mm-util help-fns mail-prsvr mail-utils time-date tooltip electric
uniquify ediff-hook vc-hooks lisp-float-type mwheel dos-w32 ls-lisp
w32-common-fns disp-table w32-win w32-vars tool-bar dnd fontset image
regexp-opt fringe tabulated-list newcomment lisp-mode prog-mode register
page menu-bar rfn-eshadow timer select scroll-bar mouse jit-lock
font-lock syntax facemenu font-core frame cham georgian utf-8-lang
misc-lang vietnamese tibetan thai tai-viet lao korean japanese hebrew
greek romanian slovak czech european ethiopic indian cyrillic chinese
case-table epa-hook jka-cmpr-hook help simple abbrev minibuffer nadvice
loaddefs button faces cus-face macroexp files text-properties overlay
sha1 md5 base64 format env code-pages mule custom widget
hashtable-print-readable backquote make-network-process w32notify w32
multi-tty emacs)

Memory information:
((conses 8 75908 6759)
(symbols 32 17433 0)
(miscs 32 73 127)
(strings 16 10713 4029)
(string-bytes 1 279807)
(vectors 8 8926)
(vector-slots 4 382520 5128)
(floats 8 56 203)
(intervals 28 246 36)
(buffers 508 13))