User init file not being loaded

I am running Windows 95 and Cygwin 32 with coolview. I do not use password protection and I have not created a unix type passwd file. While poking into this I have found a couple of things. I have setup a USER environment variable in my cyqwin.bat file. 1. The variable init-file-user is set to the value of USER even though I have not invoked xemacs with a "-u" command line option. 2. If I evaluate (expand-file-name (concat "~" init-file-user "/")) I get /develop/xemacs-20/lisp/~dbush where the current buffer directory is /develop/xemacs-20/lisp and USER=dbush. If I (setq init-file-user "") and then evaluate (expand-file-name ...) again I get the value of HOME as expected. The question is where should this be fixed? The comments in fileio.c indicate that ~foo and ~ should be equivalent if foo is the curent user - at least in the Windows NT case. The other possibility is to modify the behavior of init-file-user so it is set only if the -u option is used. I've looked for other uses of init-file-user and don't see them, but I have only a limited set of packages installed. Please bear with these questins. I can figure out how to fix something technicaly, but it is harder to get a good sense on integrating with the ongoing development philosophy. david