Problem with Travelling with iMatch

[impster]

I have a desktop and a laptop and both are running Windows 10: on the desktop WIndows 10 Pro, on the laptop, Windows 10 Home. I've read "Travelling with iMatch" and I must be doing something wrong.  On my PC my user account is named "Kit" but all my user information, including photools.com is stored under Users\User and when I run whoami from the command prompt, it says kits-pc-2\user ("kits-pc-2" is the name of my desktop). There is no user named "Kit" on the desktop although that is the name I log in as.  On the laptop (named PeregritKit), my user account is named Kitster and when I run whoami on the laptop, it reports that I am peregrit\kitster.  On the laptop the user account that holds all my AppData folders, including "Roaming\photools.com" is called "Kit".

Following the "Tom and Jerry" example in Travelling with iMatch, I tried to put "User" as the Alias in the iMatch on my desktop, thinking that iMatch would use that account name instead of "Kit" on the laptop.  After hitting "Apply" and restarting iMatch, the user-name alias was blank.  I tried it again but again the user name alias was blank, when I expected it would show "user".

Question #1: Am I right in thinking that the entry I made on the Desktop under "User name alias" should have shown what I entered?
Question #2: How does iMatch know whether to use the log-in name or the alias, or does it always use the alias if it is present?

How can I solve this so I can properly use "Travelling with iMatch"?

[Mario]

This is really weird. Never heard about that.

When I do a whoami I get the proper MACHINE\Mario .

Windows does all kinds of strange things with user profiles and roaming. But I have never seen a user with a user profile folder that is directly "user"
Do you perhaps use Microsoft Logins on these machines, not local log ins?

IMatch does not deal with all this directly, by all means.

When it needs to load or store data for all users, it asks Windows for the application storage folder for all users.
This is the folder Windows shows you when you type %PROGRAMDATA% into the Windows Explorer address bar.
This is where IMatch stores presets, templates and the central settings database (IMatch.PTS) for all users

For per-user storage IMatch asks Windows for the %APPDATA% folder, which is usually something like C:\Users\<USER_NAME>\AppData\Roaming

The settings database is where IMatch stores all your settings. Per-user data is stored there under the name of the currently logged-in user, as provided by Windows.
IMatch assumes that different user names have different settings.

To overcome the fact that users log in under different user names on different computers, I've introduced the Alias feature. But that is only for accessing data in the IMatch storage database. This cannot change the folder under which IMatch stores and loads per-user data in the file system. This will always be the %APPDATA% folder, which depends on your user profile.

Tip: IMatch logs the folders it uses in the IMatch log file (Help > Support > View Application ...).
Search for Personal Folder to find the information. The folder listed there are used by IMatch to store your user data, and the paths should contain your user name.

Also search for Logging in user to find the name under which IMatch logs you into the IMatch database. This name will also be used to load/store your settings.