Question

I am using Delphi 7 on Windows 7 and have an application which uses a TFileListBox component to iterate through files in a directory and copies them to a backup directory.

I’m experiencing some strange behavior whereby the TFileListBox is detecting files which do not exist within the directory?? The directory I am coping from contains 75 files but the TFileListBox detects over 100 files.

I changed my explorer settings to display hidden/system files but still cannot see where these extra files are coming from.

I was wondering whether this Windows 7 Previous Versions was playing a part in this problem as I am fairly sure that the extra files the TFileListBox is detecting did used to once reside in this directory but were deleted…

Any help on this would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

We have worked out from the comments above that the issue is related to the Virtual Store which is used when your application is virtualized. The virtual store was introduced with Windows Vista as part of the move to running applications without administrator rights. These files are appearing in the virtual store because your application is writing to the program files directory, to which standard users do not have write privileges.

Virtualization was introduced to help deal with legacy applications that were not going to be recompiled to take account of the new Vista policies. Nowadays you simply should not be building a virtualized application.

You can disable virtualization by linking an application manifest to your application that includes the <requestedExecutionLevel level="asInvoker"/> section.

When you do this, you will no doubt find some other problems because your application may attempt to write to the program files directory, the HKLM section of the registry, etc. Whilst it may seem painful to make these changes, they are worth the effort.