We’ve had a couple of recent calls where people haven’t been able to open, delete or rename a file because of the above error.

In fact, this one pretty much does what it says on the tin. It’s not the file name on its own, but the path it’s attached to which causes the problem.

Basically, Windows can only resolve path/file names which are less than 256 characters, and any time you refer to a file, Windows checks the full path – so if you’re working on a share at \\campus\pss\directorate\TeamSecure\Admin\Holidays\Rota.xls, this is how Windows sees it. If the total number of characters in this path exceeds 256, it will return an error.

There is a way around it – you can map a drive a long way down the path. So, in the example above, you could map drive T: to \\campus\pss\directorate\TeamSecure\Admin\Holidays and it will then open the file without a problem. However, on the new desktop you won’t be using mapped drives (network locations are the way forward!) so that’s not really the answer.

Frankly, the only real solution to this is to shorten your file and folder names. Windows isn’t really designed to cope with lengthy sentences as folders, so try and keep them descriptive but brief. If you rename your folders in this way, this problem should disappear!