No, why would I do something like that on a development box? (Or run web stuff on Windows servers for that matter.) And pretty much the only things I install with -g are useful CLI tools - any code I write will have its dependencies installed locally and listed in package.json for 'npm install'.
It wasn't clear (to me) that this was a development box. And it certainly wasn't something npm could know -- so my point still stands. If there's a way to install packages globally, then they should be globally available -- also on windows. But perhaps this is documented somewhere.
As for why you would run stuff on windows, perhaps you were writing an ajax gateway to a legacy system and it made more sense to run the node server on the same machine as the legacy system?
(To be clear, I would pity you if that was the case, but you never know ;-)
No, why would I do something like that on a development box? (Or run web stuff on Windows servers for that matter.) And pretty much the only things I install with -g are useful CLI tools - any code I write will have its dependencies installed locally and listed in package.json for 'npm install'.