While writing my last post, I stumbled across the definition of MAX_PATH on Windows:

That’s right, Windows path lengths are limited to 260 chars. I would have expected a lot of problems in big production systems with this limit. Luckily, there is an article in the Microsoft knowledge base with the solution:

…, select the folder one level above the folder that returns the error. Right-click the folder returning the error and then click Rename. Rename the folder to reduce the number of characters used in the folder name.

Another legacy limitation that will be hard to lift.