Ah, yes...

So in my naive optimism I tried to copy miscellaneous data from my old 
32-Bit Windows XP machine to my new 64-bit machine - bulk, 50 GB in 
170,000 files - via network, using Windows Explorer.

Guess what happened...

Of /course/ Windows Explorer aborted halfway throught the copying 
process, this time complaining that some resulting pathname would be too 
long...


... but wait! That's not even the punchline yet: Using BeyondCompare to 
copy the remaining files, I encountered no problems whatsoever; even the 
files within the offending directory were copied ok.

And Windows Explorer displayed the directory name fine afterwards. It 
just refused to open it - or rename it, for that matter. (It did open a 
HTML page with an even longer filename though.)

Thanks, Microsoft, for designing the most essential file system 
management tool to have more severe pathname length limitations than the 
file system to be managed...

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