diff --git a/src/main-process/atom-application.coffee b/src/main-process/atom-application.coffee
index 8e889ecca..f6802705e 100644
--- a/src/main-process/atom-application.coffee
+++ b/src/main-process/atom-application.coffee
@@ -8,7 +8,6 @@ FileRecoveryService = require './file-recovery-service'
 ipcHelpers = require '../ipc-helpers'
 {BrowserWindow, Menu, app, dialog, ipcMain, shell, screen} = require 'electron'
 {CompositeDisposable, Disposable} = require 'event-kit'
-crypto = require 'crypto'
 fs = require 'fs-plus'
 path = require 'path'
 os = require 'os'
@@ -34,16 +33,11 @@ class AtomApplication
   # Public: The entry point into the Atom application.
   @open: (options) ->
     unless options.socketPath?
-      username = if process.platform is 'win32' then process.env.USERNAME else process.env.USER
-      # Lowercasing the ATOM_HOME to make sure that we don't get multiple sockets
-      # on case-insensitive filesystems due to arbitrary case differences in paths.
-      atomHomeUnique = path.resolve(process.env.ATOM_HOME).toLowerCase()
-      hash = crypto.createHash('sha1').update(username).update('|').update(atomHomeUnique)
-      atomInstanceDigest = hash.digest('hex').substring(0, 32)
       if process.platform is 'win32'
-        options.socketPath = "\\\\.\\pipe\\atom-#{options.version}-#{process.arch}-#{atomInstanceDigest}-sock"
+        userNameSafe = new Buffer(process.env.USERNAME).toString('base64')
+        options.socketPath = "\\\\.\\pipe\\atom-#{options.version}-#{userNameSafe}-#{process.arch}-sock"
       else
-        options.socketPath = path.join(os.tmpdir(), "atom-#{options.version}-#{process.arch}-#{atomInstanceDigest}.sock")
+        options.socketPath = path.join(os.tmpdir(), "atom-#{options.version}-#{process.env.USER}.sock")
 
     # FIXME: Sometimes when socketPath doesn't exist, net.connect would strangely
     # take a few seconds to trigger 'error' event, it could be a bug of node