Hello my name is Shasank and today I am going to discuss a customer issue that we recently worked on where a customer reported that Windows Explorer was displaying two Windows directories and Windows Explorer (or powershell) could not remove the folder. For example:
Both folders had the same content. This extra \Windows folder was created by the Windows Search Service based on this DataDirectory registry key:
It was determined that an administrator had configured the following group policy for Windows Search
Indexer Data Location
It was set to c:\windows search. When the Windows Search service saw this registry key it created a Windows folder with a trailing space as shown in the following from NTFSI output
FRS 1568
FRS 78b
If we used dir /x to view the 8.3 names we could see the following:
We were able to finally remove the directory using one of the following commands:
- rd C:\window~1
- rd "\\?\C:\Windows “
Hope this helps if you ever encounter an issue like this. Thanks
Shasank Prasad
Senior Support Escalation Engineer
Microsoft Customer Service & Support