OrCAD no longer starts. Thank you 560 admins. Was getting an "Application has failed to start because cdsCommon.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem"
Found that this dll existed perfectly happily in the tools/bin directory under my CDSROOT directory. Found out how to change the $PATH variable in XP. Added the tools/bin directory to the $PATH and it's up now. My $PATH didn't have anything obviously wrong with it before I edited it though, even though there was no OrCAD paths in it. Either a chunk of the $PATH just got bitten off, or some other variable that OrCAD uses in place of the $PATH was mangled. The $CDSROOT and $CDS_LIC_FILE variables were both there and looked good. A search of recently changed files is what leads me to implicate the admins, as some WBEM stuff changed and the wbemcore.log file seems to indicate that something bad happened on Sunday and there was some kind of restore. Also Patchlink ran on Monday.
To change environment variables, right click on my computer, select properties, go to the Advanced tab, click on Environment Variables. Per: http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000549.htm
There's almost nothing on OrCAD environment variables to be found through Google, but the following few OrCAD forum posts were very enlightening, all about customers' struggles to solve the maddening slow start problem that everybody I know is also experiencing:
http://www.orcad.com/forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9172
http://www.orcad.com/forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=14748
http://www.orcad.com/forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=12819
