Folder Explosion

Is there something wrong with the Vista64 folder system? I don't even know what to call this problem.

Inside my user folder is an "AppData" folder and a shortcut to an "Application Data" folder. Inside the "Application Data" folder is another shortcut to "Application Data" and so on for 23 levels deep! One (shorter) example is below:

C:\Users\zBobG\Local Settings\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows\UsrClass.dat

These folders are marked as shortcuts with the little lower left arrow, so I suspect they shouldn't be there. Where did they come from and what do I do with them? I suspect that I can just delete them but I still don't know why they're there or who put them there.

In addition there is a shortcut to "History" and "Temp Internet files" and some others that I think also shouldn't be there. All these shortcuts point back to the 'regular' standard Vista folders.

Is this "shortcut" folder problem possibly related to installing programs that were designed for XP and not designed for Vista?

Try typing the folder path on Windows Explorer like this:

C:\users\zBobG\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows\

and see if it opens the folder with the UsrClass.dat in it.

If it does, it's just Vista keeping the shorcut-followed history on the address bar that gives you this problem.

Yes, there is a folder by that name and you can get to that file (UsrClass.dat) in the "top" level folder. And... there is also a shortcut in that folder with another UsrClass.dat file, of course it's the same file, and another shortcut and so on. I've never explicitly opened the UsrClass.dat either by typing the name anywhere (let alone the address bar) nor have I used any program that explicitly opens that file.

What's odd is that none of this folder shortcut propagation nonsense happens in Vista32, only in Vista64.

The main problem is that the full pathnames soon exceed the max allowed filename length. This becomes a problem because I use a file scanner that now sees these too long full pathnames and chokes, I've since fixed that error so that the program just ignores the too long pathnames. Nevertheless, my user folder is crowded with shortcuts to folders, that just isn't right.