I always thought it was because that space in “Program Files” was troublesome for a lot of programs, particularly command-line ones. IIRC, older versions of Min

I always thought it was because that space in “Program Files” was troublesome for a lot of programs, particularly command-line ones. IIRC, older versions of MinGW for instance would simply not work at all if installed in a path containing a space, because some of their startup scripts didn’t properly quote all parts of the path.