It gets even more fun when you have no choice but to use a poorly maintained closed-source third-party library (par for the course on Windows). If the library authors didn't use this trick themselves you can get stuck in situations where you have no way to make the library open the file without resorting to the DOS 8.3 name. And if the user disabled 8.3 names system-wide... then the only consolation is that something even more important on the system will probably break first. A sad state of affairs in 2016.