From emacs TEXINPUTS doesn't work

[Antonio Rodriguez <arodriguez31@cfl.rr.com>]

I'm having a strange thing happening to me:
In .bashrc and .bash_profile I have the line

export TEXINPUTS=".:~/my_tex_macros:"

It has been working fine, until yesterday I noticed that it wasn't,
the macro from that directory wasn't loaded. From the console, and
from the xterm they work, but not from emacs (C-c C-c calling tex
gives that error). From the xterm, 'tex file.tex' works fine. The
problem seems to be somewhere in emacs, or '.emacs', but can't figure out
what, because I haven't touched '.emacs' for years.