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I sort of get most of these - they're internal to various bits of Microsoft technology. 'CON' plus the ones ending in $ are internal device names dating back to MS-DOS, 'desktop.ini' is a magic file that Explorer uses, '_vti_' is something I've seen but can't remember what it was from.

But 'forms'? Why is 'forms' a bad word?

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_vti is the mortal enemy of anyone involved in web hosting during the mid-90s to early 2000s. Those are the server-side scripts and configuration for FrontPage, originally developed by Vermeer Technologies Incorporated.

Thank you! That was bugging me, but now that you mentioned FrontPage I clearly recall all of the _vti stuff.

I did some quick looking and it seems like SharePoint creates a hidden folder called “forms” to store, unsurprisingly, forms associated with a resource. Aren’t polluted namespaces grand?

Ah, that makes some amount of sense.

But... Why not just call it "_forms" or ".forms", which are already prohibited due to the first character?

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