Support for Windows Vista and Windows 7
Changes related to security
Because Windows Vista and Windows 7 enforces certain practices for security purposes Liberty BASIC has been reworked to fit within the expected behavior.
In previous versions of Liberty BASIC all files would be kept in the Liberty BASIC folder. This was a very convenient arrangement but newer versions of Windows do not allow an application that is installed in a folder under Program Files to create or write to files in its own folder or a subfolder. Instead applications are expected to keep all their information and user files in the User Data folder. This is the way that Liberty BASIC works when installed on Vista or Windows 7. The location of the User Data folder isn't always the same, but an application asks Windows for the location of this folder.
As a Liberty BASIC programmer you may sometimes need to know the location of the Liberty BASIC application and also the location of User Data. To make this easy, Liberty BASIC programs have access to two global variables.
The variable named DefaultDir$ points to the location where your program will read and write files.
The variable StartupDir$ points to the location where Liberty BASIC is running from. Unless your copy of Liberty BASIC is not installed in C:\Program Files you will not be able to write to files in that location.
If you are running on Windows XP or another earlier version of Windows the DefaultDir$ and StartupDir$ variables will point to the same place.
Help file changes
Microsoft decided not to support their own WinHlp32 help file format, so we needed to choose a new format for help. HTML seemed like the safest choice and most immune to obsolescence, so that's the new format for Liberty BASIC help files.