So today FolderTrack was having a wonderful day over at Bits-Du-Jour. Then a customer sent me the this great email:

From A H

Hi Nick,

this error occures every time I start the GUI-Part of your Foldertracker…
It happened immediately after adding my first folder to watch ‘My Documents’.
After this the program doesn’t start anymore, just the ‘usual’ does not work any more… Windows ist searching for…

What! This is basic functionality. I have this little diagnostic program I use to debug start up errors with FolderTrack. Before I sent it to him I tried it on my My Documents folder. The program threw an error:

 “Access to the path ‘C:\Users\John\Documents\My Videos’ is denied”. 

The problem: Windows Junctions. 

In Windows 7, Microsoft made your My Documents folder contain these sort of kind but not really links. The Explorer hides them but they are still kind of exist. There seem to be 3 of them:

• My Music
• My Pictures
• My Videos

Below is a list of directories that Windows says are in the My Documents folder. The folders in red are not really there:

3. C:\Users\John\Documents\FolderTrack
4. C:\Users\John\Documents\FolderTrack Builds
5. C:\Users\John\Documents\FolderTrackBuildManager
6. C:\Users\John\Documents\My Music
7. C:\Users\John\Documents\My Pictures
8. C:\Users\John\Documents\My Videos
9. C:\Users\John\Documents\My Web Sites

Don’t believe me? Go on and try to create a My Music folder in My Documents. You will end up with a goofy window like the one below saying the folder already exist.

Anyway I got around the error by using a recursive function to get the real items in the folder. If you are interested in the code download the diagnostic here and check out the “GetDirectoriesAndFiles” function.