When you install a program, normally it will install automatically to a given location. Sometimes you can change the location. Unless it is necessary, I don't recommend doing this, and I will explain why.

I was installing a plugin for Photoshop CS4 on my Vista Ultimate 64-bit machine. The path was C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Photoshop CS4\Plug-ins. I had installed a number of plugins from this same company before. For some reason, and I could have been responsible for the change, they were installed in C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Photoshop CS4\Plug-ins\Filters. So the first group were in the Filters folder and the latest one was in the Plug-ins folder. Here is what happened. Aside from an error message, the program did not work correctly. This is because it needed to replace a *.8li file with a newer one. Because it wasn't installed to the same location when the new filter was installed, this *.8li didn't replace the older one. The error message was misleading so while I knew what was wrong, I could not, in this case, correct the problem except by moving all the programs into the Plug-ins folder. This was easy because they were self-contained.

Thus, it is not always updates or new versions of a program that will look for the path, but other plugins from the same manufacturer. If you keep everything consistent and follow the path specified, you will have less trouble. What the support person told me is that most 3rd party manufacturers have the plugins or filters going into the Plug-ins folder in Photoshop and not into the Filters folder which is mainly reserved for Photoshop filters. With some older filters that were manufactured for the CS version or earlier but will still work with Photoshop CS4, I have had to put the path in manually.