Gimp: Opening files with long path names

[joel]

With my current version of gimp (1.3),  when you try to open a file, the 
default directory is always ~/My Documents
This means that if you are working with files in a directory with a long 
path name, like:
~/Network/HAMMER10/public/disks/hdc5/Pictures/MaineVac
you have to work your way through the whole directory structure to open 
one file. Opening a second file in the same directory makes you walk 
through the whole file structure again. That is, Gimp doesn't seem to 
remember the last directory you were working in.
I cannot find any configuration file for gimp which would change this 
behavior.
cd ~/.gimp-1.3
find . | grep Documents
shows nothing of interest.
Doing the same thing in /etc/gimp/1.3 shows nothing.
The command for starting gimp (gimp-1.3) is not a script, but the binary 
itself, so nothing to tweak there.
However,
strings gimp-1.3 | grep Documents   shows this:
~/My Documents/
So, it looks like they have compiled this directory into the binary.
If you go to the directory with the file browser and click on it, this 
saves walking repeatedly through the file structure, but, you have to 
choose each time if you want to open with gimp-1.3 or gimp-remote-1.3, 
not very convenient.
I could edit the binary to point to a symbolic link, but that seems 
excessive.
Any insights appreciated.
Joel
P.S. Please don't suggest getting the source and recompiling. I am 
really into this Debian thing. apt-get install is habit forming.