Radiolaria: What do you mean by it becoming virtualized? I've never heard of that :-)
Starting in Windows Vista, and as far as I know continuing in all subsequent Windows (Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10), certain filesystem paths have special rules. Prior to Windows Vista, it was common practice for everyone to run everything as Administrator, so many programs developed the bad habit of writing their user-specific data (like your save games, or your exported characters) to paths that they should not have used, such as C:\Windows or the game's install directory. When Windows Vista made it much harder to run programs as Administrator, these programs would have been unable to save their data to the Administrator-only paths. Microsoft knew they had no hope of getting all the relevant programs to be updated to write to user-specific paths ("C:\Users\Me\My Documents\My Games\<game name>"), due both to the number of affected games and that some of those games had been abandoned by their creators, who may in turn have gone out of business. This gave Microsoft three choices:
- Do nothing. Blame the games. Insist that games be updated or abandoned. Users would not take this well.
- Do nothing. Tell users to run everything as Administrator, like they had always done before. This would work, but contradicted Microsoft's goal of having uses run things as Administrator only for a good reason related to actually administering the system, like installing a program.
- Find a way to let the games keep working, without giving them Administrator. Microsoft went this route, and the specific way they picked was that, if a non-Administrator program writes to one of these specially picked paths, the system claims to do what was requested, but silently redirects the write to a different path that the user can actually access. Attempts to read back the data are likewise redirected, so from the game's perspective, it looks like the files were put in the install directory, just like they always had been. However, when you run Windows Explorer, the system sees that Explorer is exempt from filesystem virtualization, so you only see things in the install path that are actually there. You don't see the files that were redirected. For those, you need to go look in the Virtual Store where they were sent. That's why MarkusRamikin suggested that path, and suggested trying Windows' file search feature.
