Comment 9 for bug 852447

Obviously, my description was not clear enough and next time I will try to make it better. The situation is exactly as Chris Morgan outlined.

If you get the preferences in your directory, this means that you are using one account for the administration and for the normal use, and when elevation of privileges is required, this is done with UAC but for the same account.

The problem I am describing appears when we have an extra account for administration, it is different from the account we are using for the normal operation. The normal "user" account cannot elevate its privileges. So, when the installer requires elevated privileges, it is actually run under this separate admin account with all its associated folders (%APPDATA% expands differently). Hence the preferences are stored in this extra account. When we run Inkscape normally, the preferences accessed from the directory of this normal user account.