Groucho,
First question of the day is whether this Windows 7 installation is per chance the result of an upgrade or migration from Windows XP ?
Second question of the day is are you running Windows 7 in XP mode ?
I suspect you are most likely seeing symlinks caused by one of the aforementioned.
See also
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/lib...=vs.85%29.aspx