Having problems specifing -datadir

It was able to reproduce this.  The database doesn't like the relative path.

"bitcoind -datadir=./subdir getinfo" works against a running daemon, but trying to start the daemon as "bitcoind -datadir=./subdir" gets that exception.

I guess we should resolve the full path before passing it to the database.

It looks like you were the first one to ever use -datadir with a relative path.