Funny stuff, we had this problem at work:
The publisher needed to have the game tested, but for pratical reasons, they needed to be able to rebuild the game at any time. Fine. We send them our builder and the data. Unfortunately, we were working in a W: drive that they were already using for something else, and they had not enough disk space, and it was a network drive... The solution would be to just install the game on another drive, but all our file paths were hard coded...
So I figured: OK, we can do this quick and dirty thing: I think there is a way on NTFS disks to create symbolic links between two folders. That means that we can create an empty folder on their drive and then mount the right folder on it, wherever we are on the disk. That way we don't have to change anything.
Cool, let's do that.
Yes but... as I should have expected it, this doesn't work. Linkd.exe, the program that allows this procedure is only distributed in the Windows 2000 pack or whatever. That we don't have. So we're screwed. There's a fsutil.exe in winXP, but they only provide hardlinks from files to files, not from folder to folder. And I didn't even get it to work from files to files. Classic...
Even though this episode proved me once again that the things that are so easy and powerful under GNU/linux are just plain non doable on Windows, my colleagues laughed me for preferring Linux, saying that Linux is shit. They obviously meant that the combo Cygwin/Windows can be a pain in the ass, and it's really weird that Windows is the only OS that doesn't follow the standards that EVERY other OS follow. Yeah, that's what they meant... (sigh)