When CASE matters

With a programming background I understand that sometimes things are case sensitive and it matters. What I came across today was really beyond me. We had to install a third party tool and the process involves setting an environment variable in Windows. Simple enough we set one up and since we did so successfully in the past the client decided to start it off before I got there. It took pretty much the entire morning and a few emails to support for them to tell us that we had specified our path in UPPER case (eg. D:\DUMB\PATH) and it has to be in lower case (eg. D:\dumb\path). That was the cause of the error we saw when the code decided to turn the path into D:\D:\DUMB\PATH\.. when it saw our specified path in UPPER case. WTF?!?!?! Why would you hard code things like that? Mind you the path name cannot be changed and it has to be a certain name otherwise it will just not work.