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My username has been my name which has an accented character and has broken countless Windows apps every year since forever, so I just keep a C:/Programs folder where I run stuff. You should never not fear filenames.

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I use c:\programs too, but for different reasons. C:\Programs is for portable applications that don't get installed, can be directly overwritten, and consist of at most two files with relevant names. As a bonus, I can run such programs directly from the run menu. C:\Programs\procexp for Process Explorer, for example.

I am overly aggressive with spaces and special characters in filenames: I use them everywhere and report a bug when they cause errors, because they shouldn't in this UTF-8 age.

I still don't use the special character of my name in my username because that has caused me many hard to fix troubles. Think "cannot recover user password because this user doesn't exist".

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