A German customer is having difficulty in getting our program to launch. As it happens, Windows is installed on his E:\ drive instead of the more common C:\ drive. This seems to be remarkably common in non-English speaking countries for some reason. However, it doesn't cause any problems for our program.

It's a 32-bit program running on Win7 64-bit, so normally we'd expect it to be installed in C:\Program Files (x86)\Mixbus. But in our client's case, Explorer shows the install folder as E:\Programme (x86)\Mixbus

For some reason, he can't launch the program and I've spent nearly 2 days trying to figure out why. Eventually I asked him to open a Command Prompt and type these lines:-

E:
cd "\Programme (x86)\Mixbus"
but each time he attempts the 2nd line he sees this error:-
Das System kann den angegebenen Pfad nicht finden
or, roughly translated, "folder not found".

After 2 days we've finally realised that if he types this at his Command Prompt:-

E:
cd "\Program Files (x86)\Mixbus"
he can access the correct folder!! So although Explorer displays his Program Files folder as E:\Programme (x86), under the hood it still seems to be called E:\Program Files (x86) !!!!

This seems totally weird to me. I had no idea that foreign locales simply translate the system folder names! Can anyone tell me if this is commonplace in non-English locales or is there something peculiar about our client's setup?