I upgraded from Win XP SP-2 + many service releases 
to Vista Ultimate.
I use ZipBackup. When I noticed that none of the backups were completing, I investigated the profiles and noticed a number of “Documents and Settings” entries, which were correct for XP. ZipBackup was backing up some of the D&S folders and files but didn’t find others. This was kind of strange since I saw no D&S folder in the Windows Explorer window. When I entered “C:Documents and Setting” in the address bar, an “access denied” window popped up that said “C:Documents and Settings is not accessible.”
Ah, ha, it exists! So I entered “C:Documents and SettingMyUserName”. Voila! The files and folder structure displayed looked just like C:UsersMyUserName. Since my 4.5GB Documents folder seemed replicated in both locations, i wondered why I couldn’t just delete the D&S Documents folder. Long story short – it appears that the entries in “C:Documents and SettingMyUserName” are just links (junctions) to folders in other locations in C:UsersMyUserName and C:UsersPublic. According to the articles I skimmed, deleting files and folders in the Win XP legacy D&S folder will also delete the same ones in the in the Vista C:User folder,
This is a little confusing because the entries in the Windows Explorer window are listed a true files and folders, which would lead one to think that they can be deleted. Now, I realize that we “users” aren’t supposed to find this “invisible” folder. I performed a number of searches here in Woody’s lounge for “junction” and “documents and settings” but I found no discussions so I decided to place this here for others who might encounter the same situation.
For the errors or over simplifications in this post I apologize and look forward to replies from you MVPs and others more knowledgeable.
For other users who are having difficult locating folders like “Shared Documents” and “Templates”, I refer you to Finding the User Settings in Vista. I’ve attached a most useful table from that article.
