Win7 loses PATH from user profile

Question

Recently, a very weird thing started to happen that has not happened before: Suddenly, from out of nothing Windows 7 & "forgets" the part from PATH from the user profile.

As can be seen on the screenshot below, I define PATH in the userprofile as %PATH%;%JAVA_HOME%\bin;%USR%\bin. This worked for years and also works now until suddenly it disappears: In the screenshot it can be seen that only the system part is left:

However, I need to remark that it is related to PATH, the variable SSH_AUTH_SOCK or USR are still available.

When I logoff/login it works again. Veeeeery annoying.

What can be the problem?

Answer 1

It's indeed that %PATH% got too long! I cut out all the stuff I did not net and the problem never appeared again. I don't know however, why it just suddenly appeared "out of nothing" since %PATH% should be pretty static in length ...