Adding a file to the root of C drive. Will this cause problems ?

This is a bit of an odd one.

I use a program that calls up data from a text file. This means I have many copies of the same file scattered in various project folders which is messy for a variety of reasons, not least having dozens of the same file exist.

Placing the file at the root of the drive means I can call up the file with a short address, and it all seems to work OK. The only question is whether this will cause any issues for Windows itself, particularly updates and so on.

(although I could place the file elsewhere, it means I don't get to use a short file name which is important because the filename has to appear on the workspace of the program concerned)

So will this cause any long term issues ?

Thanks for that Ken, it seems you do something similar :)

I'm trying to tidy everything up for when the Fall update comes along. Although I will clean install, I'm using the available time to get all my files in order first.

Creating files on the root of the C: drive shouldn't cause a problem for Windows, but it may be a problem for the app creating the file. The root of C: is protected and you'll get an 'administrator approval' popup if you try to manually create or save a file there. I'd create a subfolder on C: and use that.

Thanks Bree, that a really good point. This application never actually writes to the file (it is just a lookup), but I do occasionally add new data manually to it and yes, you are right... when I tried to paste a new line into it as a test there were objections. I had to open notepad as admin and locate the file manually in order to edit it. Altering the file is such an infrequent occurrence though, that I can probably live with that.

I'll see how it all works in practice now... great not to have all those duplicate files in numerous folders which was the main reason for trying this.