Don't use ~ in xfce autostart

I've been setting up Zenwalk 5.2 on my Dell Desktop for the last few days. Once I learned that upgrading (to a 2.6.27.4 kernel) is not a good idea, this is turning out more like an updated version of the ZW 4.8 I had liked so much before.
In particular, this new version has all the 3D effects and other eye candy that were not available on 5.2. It's looking like a very useful OS.
However, although I had already set up both Yakuake and Fusion-Icon in Autostarted Applications, I just couldn't get Gmail-Notifier to autostart.The command I was using in Autostarted Applications was

~/gmail-notify/notifier.py

but this didn't work.
I had thought perhaps it wasn't starting because it was starting before the network connection was made and so failed (see this post for how get over this problem). However, I couldn't figure out how to implement this solution here in ZW.
I was also suspicious that perhaps the start-up of Fusion-Icon was upsetting the launch of Gmail-Notifier (exactly why, I'm not sure but I was really stumped here why it wasn't starting) and tried to set up a bash script to start Gmail-Notifier only after Compiz was running.
Then I remembered a similar problem I had before and I changed the command in Autostarted Applications to

/home/paul/gmail-notify/notifier.py

and it worked perfectly.
So, it seems that that early in the boot that ~ is not yet recognized as /home/paul/.