Sam's Rotor woes continue but we finally found the reason for his problems. Here's the thing everyone should check before playing around with Rotor .... else you might end up with some mysterious error messages.

[WARNING: Using Registry Editor incorrectly can cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall Windows. Neither Microsoft nor I can guarantee that problems resulting from the incorrect use of Registry Editor can be solved. Use Registry Editor at your own risk. ]

Start RegEdt32.Exe and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Control\\FileSystem. Check the entry NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation. It should be set to 0 [zero]. If it has been set to 1 while installing Visual Studio.NET, you may be out of luck with Rotor.

To make sure, you should open a command prompt, go to C:\Program Files (or wherever you installed VS.NET) and run "dir /x micro*". If a line like this is included in the output, everything should be ok:

20.01.2002  13:01  <DIR>  MICROS~1.NET  Microsoft Visual Studio.NET

If you don't see anything that looks like "MICROS~1.NET" next to "Microsoft Visual Studio.NET" you might have the problem.

In this case you should change NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation to 0 [that is: zero], reboot, de-install Visual Studio.NET, manually delete \\Program Files\\Microsoft Visual Studio.NET (if it still exists; but backup anything interesting before doing so). Then you can re-install it and the necessary short name (DOS-style 8.3 file name) will be created for this directory.

I'm currently looking for a better solution to this problem: Does anyone know any tool that allows to create a short filename for a file or directory that already exists?