[How do I run second life from a flash drive, and still save user settings?]

Also, whenever possible, to make sure the batch file works on a variety of environments make sure to use environment variables instead of hard coded paths. For example, on Vista and Windows 7, "Documents and Settings" is called C:\Users and the folder structure is different.

So instead of referencing "C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data", you should use "%APPDATA%\SecondLife\Settings.xml" or whatever. Type "set" at a command prompt to see the available environment variables.

[How do I run second life from a flash drive, and still save user settings?]

The copying is not a bad idea. From the batch file, when you call another process, the batch file will normally continue. You can use the START command with the /WAIT parameter like so:

START "Second Life" /WAIT "Blah\SecondLife.exe" --settings Blah.xml

The start command will block until the SecondLife.exe process exits, then continue on to the next line, allowing you to copy back to the Flash drive.

[How do I run second life from a flash drive, and still save user settings?]

Should be pretty easy to do with a batch file instead. Create a file called SecondLife.cmd and type:

"%PROGRAMFILES%\SecondLife\SecondLife.exe" --settings "%CD%\Settings.xml"

[How do I run second life from a flash drive, and still save user settings?]

You would definitely not want to store the cache on a flash drive. Compared to modern hard drives, flash drives have very good seek times but very poor transfer rates. They are good for when you need to randomly access small chunks of data. But locating the binaries on the flash drive should not be a problem because they will be pulled into memory when run.

[How do I run second life from a flash drive, and still save user settings?]

Oh hey nice I just found this page. Suggests you could use a -settings parameter to specify the path to a user settings file.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Client_parameters

[How do I run second life from a flash drive, and still save user settings?]

Ah then you'll probably need to either work with the source code or look into something expensive like VMWare ACE.

[How do I run second life from a flash drive, and still save user settings?]

One thing you could do if you run Vista or Windows 7 is to use symbolic links. It's fairly easy (depending on your comfort level with command prompts and such) to set this up but you'd need to do it on each computer on which you ran the client.

Assume your flash drive letter is F and your Windows login name is Josh.

First, create a folder F:\SecondLife.

Then, *move* the folder C:\Users\Josh\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife to F:\SecondLife and rename it "Data".

Then, *move* the folder C:\Program Files\SecondLife and rename it "Bin".

Next, open a command prompt as an administrator (cmd.exe, PowerShell will not work for this) and type:

MKLINK /D "C:\Users\Josh\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife" "F:\SecondLife\Data"

MKLINK /D "C:\Program Files\SecondLife" "F:\SecondLife\Bin"

Now, Second Life can go on happily writing files to the locations it thinks it installed to, but really it is redirected to the flash drive.