Windows 10 wanted to “update and restart” today. Actually, what it did, however, was to upgrade itself to build 18326 (taking about 1 hour). And during the process my “C:\Users\SDolha” folder contents was moved to “C:\Users\SDolha.000” (just like a plain old NT 4 that it is, underneath!) due to some old remaining Zune (!) temp files inside its AppData subfolder which apparently it had trouble with. Ouch, ouch, ouch!
That profile path change has broken OneDrive, Google Drive, and iCloud photo syncing, at first sight, but OK, I could restore them to the new paths with a few configurations.
But… I just remembered I also had some dev productivity .bat files which (wrongly, I admit) relied on that path! (Yes, still old batches, PowerShell is just a “good to have” for me.) And also some symbolic links (to avoid Visual Studio 250 char path issues, oh my!) that were using my exact username without referencing system/profile variables either.
No way… I didn’t want to “fix” all those (they were a few), nor I wanted to go to regedit and move my profile to the old path from another user account’s administrative session, breaking who-knows-what-else. What did I do then?
I realized that I could temporarily add write permissions for myself on the Users folder, delete SDolha from it, and create a new symbolic link SDolha pointing to SDolha.000 instead! It was as easy as this:
C:\Users>mklink /d SDolha SDolha.000
For now this seems to have worked perfectly, and I hope no tool that I use will actually check my surrogate profile’s folder’s nature.
(But no, in general, it seems Windows is not reliable anymore. Or has it every been?)
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