I had trouble today with my Windows %HOME% changing and throwing off Vagrant’s awareness of what boxes are installed. This may be your problem if Vagrant on Windows was working happily for you and then barks about no boxes.

C:\Users\you> vagrant box list
There are no installed boxes! Use `vagrant box add` to add some.

C:\Users\you>dir /b .vagrant.d\boxes
base-i-really-exist
centos-does-too

C:\Users\you>echo %HOME%
<somewhere not C:\Users\you>

C:\Users\you>set HOME=%USERPROFILE%

C:\Users\you>vagrant box list
base-i-really-exist
centos-does-too

%HOME% was different depending on whether I logged into Windows while on my Active Directory managed network or while I was offline. When on the AD network, %HOME% is set by policy to a mapped drive. When offline, %HOME% is my Windows %USERPROFILE%. I installed Vagrant and some base boxes while off my AD network and everything worked as expected. Base boxes were added to %USERPROFILE%/.vagrant.d/. Back in the office and logged in on the AD network, Vagrant was no longer aware of the base boxes because %HOME% now pointed at my personal mapped drive.

Creating a batch file to set %HOME% to %USERPROFILE% solved the problem.

# cmdrc.bat
REM %USERPROFILE%/cmdrc.bat
@echo off

set HOME=%USERPROFILE%

For UNIXy goodness, name it cmdrc.bat, place it in %USERPROFILE% and then add the following to the registry so that this file is run whenever a command prompt opens.

#text cmdrc.reg
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor]
"AutoRun"="%USERPROFILE%\\cmdrc.bat"