Just browsing StorageReview and came across this thread:

http://forums.storag...h-too-long-error/

I made the mistake of using my personal comp as a temporary dump for a friend, while I formatted/restored her notebook. Anyway, I saved all her crap to a folder on my desktop, formatted/restored her notebook, & am trying to move all her shit back to her pc but there's a file (porn video) that has very long file name that refuse to budge. It's in a folder called Incomplete, so I'm assuming it's from some P2P program she was using.

[...]

He replied later, saying he succeeded in getting it deleted. Someone asked how, so he went into the gory details.

It was a major pain in ze ass. All my Vista 'home folders' (music/desktop/documents/etc) are mapped onto a secondary physical disk (separate from the system disk). I tried booting to a command prompt & deleting, but this was a no-go too. So, I installed Vista onto a spare drive I had & slaved the disk holding my home folders on it but still could not delete this file with a mile long name. I installed Server 2K3 (eval version) & tried again to delete the file, but again without any success.

After my patience wore dangerously thin I decided to put my orig system disk back in. Then, I proceeded to remap (again) all my home folders to yet another disk. However, ofcourse I could not remap (i.e., move) the 'Desktop' folder due to this problem file. This was fine since I'd already transferred my friends data back to her notebook & moved my desktop shortcuts to the another disk also. So, in essence the only thing on my desktop now was a folder holding this stupid file. I figured I was home free & just format the disk & move my stuff back over. But nooo I could not format it either (yes, I used the /X switch).

Not being able to format made me think a bit (rare, I know), so on a hunch I created a second user account with admin rights. Then I rebooted & formatted the disk using my SCSI card's BIOS util. Booting back into Vista gave me all sorts of errors because Vista could not find my 'Desktop' folder. My background was missing & any folder/shortcut I created on my desktop was not visible. Now what to do? I thought I'd just create a new 'Desktop' folder but this did not help. The default one created by Vista is some sort of 'special' system folder & I have no idea how to recreate it. I logged in as the new temp user I created & copied its 'Desktop' folder to the same location as the other 'home' folders of my 'real' account. Logging back in using my real user account my desktop background was back & so were my shortcuts! Strange though, since I have no idea how Vista pulled that off.

Finally, I remapped my folders back to where I had them & all is well. Though I'm sure someone will chime in with a very easy 2 minute fix........

Zooks!!!

So, naturally, the immediate reply was a pointer to longpathtool.com It's $34 but sounds like a great tool to have. (No experience with it, myself.) There seems to be something similar called pathtoolong.com that is $19. - dunno anything about it either.

Cheers,
Scott.