List of user profile junction points in Windows 7 and 8

Recently, I needed to troubleshoot a Visual Studio installation gone wild on a Windows 8 machine. For reason or another, Visual Studio failed to start, and reported on many missing files, even though it had been installed on a clean system with only Office 2013 installed before it. The problem was finally solved thru a re-install, but while at it, I noticed I couldn't easily find a list of Windows 7's or Windows 8's user profile junction points on the Internet.

Thus, I decided to list them here just in case somebody else happens to need them. To list the junction points in a certain directory, you can run the "dir /a:hs" command from the command prompt. From the output, you can see junction points listed with the type as "<JUNCTION>pp".

If you run this dir command on Windows 7/8 in your own profile directory, such as "C:\Users\MyName", then you will get a list of the following junction points:

• Application Data => C:\Users\SomeUserName\AppData\Roaming
• Cookies => C:\Users\SomeUserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies
• Local Settings => C:\Users\SomeUserName\AppData\Local
• My Documents => C:\Users\SomeUserName\Documents
• NetHood => C:\Users\SomeUserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Network Shortcuts
• PrintHood => C:\Users\SomeUserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Printer Shortcuts
• Recent => C:\Users\SomeUserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent
• SendTo => C:\Users\SomeUserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo
• Start Menu => C:\Users\SomeUserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu
• Templates => C:\Users\SomeUserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Templates

On the left, you have the junction point name (the "alias"), and on the right you have the physical folder it points to. You can think of junction points as shortcuts, but on NTFS file system level.

Oh, when working with junction points, you might find the Sysinternals utility called Junction useful. Be sure to check it out.