[h-e-w] still having problems with .emacs in Win 7

[Michael Mossey]

Under Win 7, I was having trouble recently trying to create or edit a file 
named .emacs in c:\. Following advice here, I typed ctrl-x ctrl-f ~/.emacs. 
It tried to write it to c:\! Then I upgraded from version 21 of emacs to 
version 23. Same behavior. I don't know.. I seem to have screwed up the 
configuration. It's completely ignoring the AppData location.

In the System dialog I can't find a mention of either the APPDATA or HOME 
environment variable.

Any ideas would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Mike