What is the meaning of these Windows Environment variables: HOMEDRIVE, HOMEPATH, HOMESHARE, USERPROFILE

if you go to the run box and type any of the above like this

%HOMEPATH%

then it will go to your environment path that is set on your machine. It's usefull when writing vb scrips and things like that where you want to perform a task on the users profile area for example.

Hope this helps

Those are all set on login, and they are, as SocialAddict said, very useful in scripts when you need to perform an action on different systems.

I'm not too clear on your other question, a samba server shouldn't care about those variables.

See http://vlaurie.com/computers2/Articles/environment.htm for a detailed explanation.