Locating the Truly Hidden Files
Even when you reconfigure Windows Explorer to show you the maximum number of files, it doesn’t. Microsoft has a few files that they don’t trust anyone to see, so Windows Explorer hides them. These files appear many levels deep in the drive hierarchy—so deep that you must often know precisely where to look to find them. For example, when you install Office 2003 with .NET Extensions
support, the installation program creates files that you can’t see using Windows Explorer. You can check this Windows Explorer feature out for yourself when you have Office 2003 installed. Look in
the \WINDOWS\assembly folder. At most, you’ll see a list of files and a \Download folder as shown in Figure 3.4.
Open a command prompt, type CD WINDOWS\assembly\GAC\Office\11.0.0.0__71e9bce111 e9429c
, and press Enter. Suddenly, you’ll see a folder well below the
\WINDOWS\assembly folder that Windows Explorer tells you is the final stop. Type DIR and press Enter. You’ll find two files in this
folder, as shown in Figure 3.5. The interesting thing is that these files aren’t hidden from the command prompt—only from Windows Explorer.
I chose this particular entry because many people own Office, so your chance of seeing it live are good. Microsoft could almost make a case for hiding this directory, but you’ll find a number of others
that aren’t so easy to defend. It’s true that most users will never need to look in this folder and many problems could occur if the user accidentally erased the DLL it contains. However, Microsoft also
makes it a practice to hide other installation, temporary, and other files on your drive. (You’ll see other examples as the book progresses.)
Figure 3.4
Even with Windows Explorer properly configured, you can’t
see everything.
Figure 3.5
The command prompt demonstrates your ability to locate files Windows Explorer won’t tell you about.
Taken From : Microsoft Windows XP Power Optimization