This still causes so many problems, I have to repost this as a fresh idea. Probably 10% of the support requests I get have to do with broken data links.
We have ArcGIS installed on hundreds of machines on campus and students often move from lab to lab to work on projects. We've managed to create a registry hack that enables this setting at installation, but REALLY!!! Should we have to do that?
Someone tell me ONE INSTANCE where absolute paths makes more sense than relative paths and I will shutup.