Windows does support long paths (up to about 32k characters): Here is a good explanation from the .net perspective (but the same holds for non-managed APIs): ht

Windows does support long paths (up to about 32k characters): Here is a good explanation from the .net perspective (but the same holds for non-managed APIs): http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bclteam/archive/2007/02/13/long-paths-in-net-part-1-of-3-kim-hamilton.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bclteam/archive/2007/02/13/long-path... Long paths are just most ugly to use: "Long paths with the \\?\ prefix can be used in most of the file-related Windows APIs, but not all Windows APIs. For example, LoadLibrary, which maps a module into the address of the calling process, fails if the file name is longer than MAX_PATH. So this means MoveFile will let you move a DLL to a location such that its path is longer than 260 characters, but when you try to load the DLL, it would fail. There are similar examples throughout the Windows APIs; some workarounds exist, but they are on a case-by-case basis."