SettingsBuilder internally converts network paths to local paths and is therefore preventing the use of network profiles

I'm not sure if this is a bug or intended but the DefaultMavenSettingsBuilder converts paths like "\\server\username\.m2\settings.xml" to "<Current Drive>:\server\username\.m2\settings.xml". This prevented us from using the default user.home because our userprofiles are located on another server and are referenced by "
" network paths. It would've been quite complicated to change the user.home system property for all developers, so we fixed the problem by removing a regular expression that replaced double backslashes by only one, followed by calling "new File(path).getAbsolutePath()" which added the current drive letter to the path and converted it to a local path this way.

I don't know the reason for removing double backslashes from the beginning but at least i didn't recognize any problems with my changes yet. It would be nice if somebody could tell me what the regexp was intended for. I attached a patch to this posting and hope it helps!