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That's... definitely not as dramatic as you try to make it sound. "Program Files" and "Documents and Settings" have been around for almost three decades, and most programs work just fine with files living somewhere inside those paths.

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I mean, let’s go past “Program Files” to “Program Files (x86)” which has both spaces and special characters, and which was moved from the former.

And most programs are able to handle that just fine.

And the "cherry on top" is there's an env-var named `%ProgramFiles(x86)%` (aka `${env:ProgramFiles(x86)}` in PS) that points to where that directory actually lives since AFAIK it's controlled by a registry entry

Sure, but that's because everyone uses SHGetFolderPath or Environment.GetFolderPath to get these paths instead of hardcoding them. Right? Right??

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