Microsoft Windows never stops surprising me. The subst command was always pain in the a… back, and the trend seems to continue. I am using a substed drive to create the same environment for projects across different machines, which is named D: in this case. Everything went smooth until today when I approached the computer with a USB stick. System happily recognizes the device and says that you can go ahead and use it. Except… you can’t. The “Removable device” becomes listed as D:. But, when you open it, all you can see is the content of the substed folder. You have to delete the substitution point until it allows you to see what is attached to USB. Who would guess?

I was programming and had to peek at some helps when I was stuck in absolutely unexplainable situation. I had these docs in .chm format, so they are actually opening in Internet Explorer, but instead of the text I had to stare at the “Page cannot be displayed” error message. What the hell? My first intents were to blame the security settings in IE (which I do not regularly use and thus have security tied up just in case). So I went and tried all imaginable combinations, relaxing securities to barely protect anything, allowing all possible evils to happen… no luck. Well, there may be some system-wide settings then, so I googled, and googled, and googled… And found absolutely nothing helpful in my case — file was on the local disk, not downloaded from the Internet, permissions were correct — I couldn’t think of anything that should prevent it from opening properly. So I was stuck. Hopelessly I decided to do a very naive thing — to move the file into a different folder — and it worked! Aha, the folder name. There were the C# related docs, so the folder was named C#. I have no idea why but Internet Explorer just hates opening files from folders with # symbol. Ridiculous!