The Assembly folder

This is a weird one.  In a search for something else entirely (which might become the subject of another post), I clicked on the c:\windows\assembly folder, and the result was a bit weird:

Specifically, the weirdness was in the icon for the filetype.  I wasn't sure if I'd been able to see the contents of this folder in the past, but a bit of research shows this is .NET's answer to the system32 folder's .dll mashup.  The folder on my computer is 1.7GB, which seems excessive, but the real problem with it is you can't make sense of what it's showing you - because it's pulling that info from a variety of subfolders, which it hides.

This, in itself, is interesting - and this is info from Geeks With Blogs about how that kind of shell namespace works.

The subfolders can be viewed from a standard command prompt.  Easiest way to accomplish this in windows seems to be to use the subst command to map a drive letter to one of the subfolders, e.g.

subst z: %windir%\assembly\GAC 
(you can then use subst z: /d to remove it when you've finished).

Alternatively, as the display of the namespace is controlled by desktop.ini, unhiding that and renaming it will cause the file structure to display in Explorer.