I'm having computer issues again (not that I've resolved many of my past issues; I've just given up on most of them). I'm transferring files from a video camera attached to a USB port on my laptop, through my network to my desktop (since the all the USB ports on the desktop randomly stopped working months ago, and I haven't been able to revive them). It went ok for the first 125 or so files, but then it popped up a "path is too deep" error and refused to transfer the last handful of files, despite me trying a few times, and even though the files were the same length and in the same location and generally almost identical to the other 125 files that had transferred without a hitch. I've had this error message before, and it's really irritating, but I searched online and some people seem to have overcome it by reducing the speed on their network adapter, so I'm trying that now, even though it's going to make it stupidly slow. From what I've been able to gather, it's more often some sort of hardware fault than an actual issue with the path.
Transferring large numbers of files is a complete pain in the ass in Windows XP; any time I've tried to transfer more than 50 or so files, it's been interrupted either by a "path is too deep" error or an access violation. It's particularly bad if I open a folder to check it's contents before transferring it, since even if I navigate back to the parent directory, some Windows process will have opened them to make thumbnails or something stupid like that, and I won't be able to transfer a few of the files in the folder until I restart the comp.
P.S. Nope, dropping the speed didn't solve the problem. It transferred about a quarter of the first file before popping up a "path is too deep" message and aborting.
Is it a FAT 16 file system? Could be that the indexes are fucked.
I'm not sure what the file system on the camera's HD is, but I transferred the files to the laptop's HD and then tried transferring it from there to the desktop, both of which are NTFS, and still had the same problem. Eventually I solved it by switching the laptop from a wireless to a wired connection.