Greenspun Tenth Rule Redux: Vista is Terrible

I just got a new laptop with Vista 64 on it. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the ACLU. But I digress.

It turns out you can't install Visual Studio 2005 from a mount point in Vista. You know, I thought it would be convenient to move on from the bad-idea-when-it-started-14-years-ago of always agreeing to map the same drive letter on each of my computers to the same actual share I maintain of software, music, etc. I thought, hey, Vista supports symbolic links. I'll map c:/users/public/software to \\myserver\public\software. And I'll install from there. No drive mappings to remember to add, remove, wait for Explorer to hang from. I'm afraid not. The VS 2005 install just fails. Why? How can it even possibly tell the difference?

Here's the kicker. Even when I mapped my F: drive like we used to do in the gay nineties, the install failed. The amazing part? The install log still complained about not being able to read from c:/users/public/software. Deep down in the system, it knew that F: was also mounted to that point on my C: drive! How could it be? Neither F: nor c:\users\public\software are the 'real' location of that share. Good lord. How does Microsoft wait 20 years to implement links and then get them wrong?

It reminds me of Greenspun's tenth rule of programming:

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

To which I should add: Any sufficiently mature operating system contains an ad-hoc informally-specified bug-ridden implementation of half of Unix. And in the great spirit of Raymond Chen, pre-emptive snarky comment: yes, that probably applies to most Unix implementations.