Thanks for the response. And I can appreciate the curiosity as to why the use of variables
1. the use of variables is due to the application running on both unix and windows platforms and using the same source to configure the application environment. It works quite well and centralizes the maintenance of a large number of clients in a hybrid os, global environment.
2. the information that you've supplied I've also seen...however, I have also seen on the microsoft site the following...
The maximum individual environment variable size is 8192bytes.
The maximum total environment variable size for all variables, which includes variable names and the equal sign, is 65,536KB.