Window's XP bug....i think

Figure 1
Explorer with files that do not exist

So at work I have been bouncing around from machine to machine due to the fact that they wanted all the new contractors we were hiring to have desktop machines verse laptops, so I gave up my desktop for one of the standard developer laptops.

That when the trouble began.

When I was moving from my old machine I created a folder on my C drive called Desktop and I copied all the files and folders from my desktop into the new c:\Desktop folder. Then once I was done with the copy I zipped up that c:\Desktop folder and then burned it to CD.

Once I was on my new machine I copied that zip file to the desktop and extracted it. Several days later after I had gotten everything set up for development I started noticing that my windows explorer would start looking like this (See Figure 1):

The strange thing is that the folder icons in windows explorer would turn to Palm Trees, Search Icons, and a strange host of other images. Then if I tried to open any files I would get this error (See Figure 2): Notice the weird ASCII character in the path.

Figure 2
The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect

Well after 4 new motherboards, three reimaged hard drives, 1 new hard drive, new memory, and a host of hardware and software techs working on the problem I was able to figure out the problem.

You can not have a folder called Desktop on your desktop. I am able to reproduce the issue on several other machines and I am extremely curious if others can reproduce the problem on 9x or XP SP2.

This is how I can reproduce the problem.

1. Create a folder called Desktop on your Desktop
2. Open Windows explorer
3. Open either Word, Excel, notepad, notepad++ and save a file to your desktop.
4. Go back to Windows explorer and either hit F5 or just navigate to a new directory.

What happens on your box?