Not quite! Suppose you have an account in a library or university or something like that where you can log-in to whatever machine and still have all of your files and installed applications. In such a situation %appdata% is the same on all machines. Basically when you log into a machine the %appdata% folder is mounted from the network (the usual directories such as My Documents are mounted the same way). The %LocalAppData% is never shared, instead, and is specific of that machine. If you login again in the same machine, your files are still there, but if you use another pc you get another folder. That can be used to have machine-specific configuration files (in LocalAppData) and user-specific configuration files (in AppData). Windows is weirder than it looks like on the surface!