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General discussion

Illegal characters.

Dec 8, 2003 12:41AM PST

Sometimes when uninstalling a program, (there is not just one),
XP will remove all but one file or so. This file will
be protected by XP. If I try to change it in any way
I get the error that the "filename contains illegal
characters". So how come it's not illegal to install
files with illegal characters, but it's illegal to
delete files with illegal characters?

~Dave

Discussion is locked

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Re:Illegal characters.
Dec 8, 2003 12:49AM PST
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Re:Re:Illegal characters.
Dec 8, 2003 1:35AM PST

Thank you. I will try those. But the main question was
why can a file be installed in XP which contains
illegal characters, but yet it cannot be moved or
deleted, or renamed because it contains illegal characters?
Why will illegal characters be accepted when naming a
file in the first place?

~Dave

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Re:Re:Re:Illegal characters. The "why" question.
Dec 8, 2003 2:15AM PST

What a program installs it will copy in files. When it runs another set of rules are in force about file naming. A long standing fun thing to learn was how to create oddball names with QBASIC.EXE It will confound all as you can create almost any filename you can think of in QBASIC, yet EXPLORER will not touch the files.

Why is this so?

Talk to Microsoft...

Bob

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Re:Re:Re:Re:Illegal characters. The
Dec 8, 2003 2:21AM PST

"Why is this so?

Talk to Microsoft..."

LOL! Have you ever tried to talk to Micro$oft?

~Dave

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It's almost like a surreal trip to Whoville.
Dec 8, 2003 2:37AM PST

I have indeed talked to many there. The best nuggets are obtained when you go to seminars Microsoft holds all the time across the US. The last one was a real humdinger...

"Embedded XP."

Bob

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Re:It's almost like a surreal trip to Whoville.
Dec 8, 2003 2:51AM PST
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Why Embedded XP was a non-starter for who I was representing.
Dec 8, 2003 3:12AM PST

Embedded "things" are getting bigger all the time. The one item that wiped Embedded XP off the consideration list was simpler than you can imagine. No politics, no love, no hate, just a pure manufacturing issue.

Embedded XP is locked to the size hard disk you target it for. It's a sort of copy protection, but in our case we used off the shelf IDE hard disks that change montly it seems.

This meant that we would need an Embedded XP "image" for each model hard disk we would use. The logistics get rather mind boggling as you try to juggle what this means in a service orginization or what happens in 1 year's time.

The MS droid couldn't grasp why we didn't just create an image as needed as the new drives showed up.

There are some compelling pluses to using Embedded XP, but it was instant death when we looked at manufacturing.

Bob