The folder name was listed in Explorer with just plain four dots .....

When I tried opening it I came into some kind of endless rabbithole loop where I opened the exact same folder again and again - I could do this endlessly. Showing the path like C:\ExamplePath\....\....\....\...\.... etc

It was hanging my TypeScript compilation in one specific project. It took me more then a year before I found this folder and it's related problems, because it was rooted deep in nested folders. I never expected an issue like this, so I never looked for it.

I couldn't delete the folder the the normal ways because of the special name. In the end I could remove it by using CommandLine and deleting the parent folder with rd /s /q path.

I tried to create the folder afterwards again, but was unable to do so with both Explorer and Command line.

In my >20 years of using Windows I've never seen this bug before, and I can imagine it can be really annoying and confusing problem for amateur users.

Does anyone know how this could have happened and how to reproduce this issue?

Update

For people that are interested; this path was located deep within a TFS folder. So probably TFS uses the bypass method @grawity explained ("Various file managers, archivers, etc")

Did I stumble on a rare TFS bug?