@wraith808

Portable only means that it doesn't need a specific location present at run time, not that it doesn't use another location temporarily.

 
Right.

It's just that if it works for a different user, it seems that permissions is the right path to go down.

It looks like that, yeah.
It's just that I don't know where to start.

I downloaded ProcessMonitor and traced the operations of Cathy.exe. But at first sight I don't see anything that indicates it hasn't enough rights to write or read.
Moreover, when starting up, it should just read the .caf files that are in the same directory as the cathy.exe.

@tomos
Sorry, but I don't know what you're trying to say in your latest post.

nothing beyond giving the little bit of extra info: file extension & location - on the off-chance that something different was going on there.

Have you tried running Cathy.exe without any other files in the same folder?

Yes. Same problem.

If you hook up some external drive (or have some other partition) and place a folder there with Cathy.exe in it, do you still get the same results?

Yes I do. (I ran it from my USB-stick)

Congratulations

...removing the registry entries created by Cathy...

It would be interesting to know what was sitting there that blocked your friend Cathy from working as expected, but I guess we'll never know

And the key name also isn't very intuitive...

Hooooooraaaaaaaay!!!! Cathy works again on my x64 Win7 machine!!!!   

The solution: removing the registry entries created by Cathy (I deleted this HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\rOva and everything beneath)

That's why it did work when I logged in with another account. (HKEY_CURRENT_USER)

D'oh!  I thought after you said that the permissions didn't work... then what about the registry?  But most portable apps don't use the registry, either, so I discarded that in favor of permissions. *headdesk*

Glad you got it working!

For future reference:

In my case the problem was caused by:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\rOva\Cathy\Settings\WindowPos

If you delete that key or set it to 0 (zero), cathy works fine but only once!
When it runs again it overwrites the key with new values ("0,1,-1,-1,-1,-1,1919219912,1818552521,1919221352,1818553281" in my case)
and on the next run you get an empty interface again.

Solution:
I solved it by setting read only permissions on the Settings subkey for my user using regedit (even though I'm in the admin group).

Hope this helps.
m.

I love Cathy's speed as well but, unless I'm mistaken, it does not handle Unicode.  At least, in my tests, it doesn't.

I love Cathy's speed as well but, unless I'm mistaken, it does not handle Unicode.  At least, in my tests, it doesn't.

You're probably right. But that's no problem for me.