Today while trying to install the dot net framework on my virtual machine I got an error just before the install started and it wouln’t install. The error was “Error 1325 - ‘documents’ is not a valid short file name” so I went to good old google and tried to find it… I found a page by micro$oft saying it occurs when you uninstall stuff and all you need to do is install this program to fix it. Sadly nothing was installing including that program, so it didn’t work.
I was starting to get rather angry and everything I found said I needed to re-install the service pack, which is a problem because my Windows XP came with Service Pack 2 already installed. While yelling at the stupid computer and cursing Micro$ofts name it occured to me the “My Documents” folder links to a share called documents, maybe thats the problem. I reset the “My Documents” path back to the default, tried the install, and it worked.
So in summary if you get an error message saying “Error 1325 - ‘File/directory name‘ is not a valid short file name” it is probably because you are using a share and pointing to it directly instead of using a virtual network drive. If you check this or restore the “My Documents” folder back to the default value it will probably fix it.
