I'm not sure this answers your question but here goes. I have Lightroom installed on a laptop and a desktop. On my portable usb drive I have my images and in the Lightroom folder I have 1) Lightroom Database Previews.lrdata
2)Lightroom Database.lrcat
3) the Lightroom Settings folder (containing presets, labels, templates etc)
That way nothing changes when I move from one computer to another, after editing or whatever. Hope that helps.
David