Wow, another entry covering some Windows oddity. One might think this OS is full of oddities :-) This time I tried to rename c:\program files because I wanted to mount another disk to c:\program files. Sure, lots of programs might be running from c:\program files, but when I stop all these programs, WindowsXP should still be able to boot and even start RDP to let me login, right? And so it did, with a few preparations made:

C:\Program Files cannot just be renamed - WindowsXP won't let you, it's some kind of magic special folde^Wdirectory. We'll use regedit to modify two keys:

Set HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ProgramFilesDir to something else, e.g. "C:\Program Files2" While this gets exported as "%ProgramFiles%" via "ProgramFilesPath", we have to edit another key:

Set HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\CommonFilesDir to something else, e.g. "C:\Program Files2\Common Files". We have to reboot to apply these changes, of course :-)

After the reboot, we should be able to rename c:\program files to something else. You might notice that our interim %ProgramFiles% directory got filled with a few directories - just ignore them. With our original c:\program files our of the way, we create an empty c:\program files, where we can now mount the other disk. Once this is done, we can start moving the our original c:\program files content (that we just moved out of the way) into our new c:\program files directory. While it's moving, we can set the registry keys we changed (see above) back to its original values.

Now reboot to get the registry settings applied and all should be well again - except that our c:\program files has now plenty of space :-)