$HOME has become set incorrectly

[mcloaked]

I have had a rock64 running archlinuxarm for several years without problems. A month or two back after pacman updates I noticed that rsync stopped working although scp works fine. After looking at what seems to have changed I have discovered that the $HOME environment variable is no longer being set to /home/myuser but instead to /

On the other hand logging in as root and checking with echo $HOME shows for root this environment variable is correctly set to /root

Has anyone come across this problem, and if so what is the way to fix the issue?

Thanks in advance.