Hmmm, I didn't try it in Firefox, just edge. I suspect Firefox is ignoring the byte order mark and just displaying the UTF-16 characters.
Anyway, I still don't know what creates the .Dat files -...

OMG, I think that article on Elsevier has the answer. The other folders under appdata\local\comms do look like a file-oriented database, like SourceSafe but without the versioning.

That said, I...

Any criticism I expressed was directed to Microsoft (not that they will be watching). The developers wont have made this change at random, a Business Analyst / Program Manager will have raised a...

Yes, I know, I have Seagate's tools, and various others for cloning discs.
My issue is still the data store though, and the file format.

Not to be too cheeky, but in this very thread you said...

I'm tech support for a family member. She has a machine with a relatively small HD, I'm trying to decide how to move forward, moving an image onto a new disc sometimes works, but if the original...

Its now 2022, and Microsoft seem to have moved the folders again. Welcome to 21H2

On my C: drive (my nice clean 250GB SSD boot drive) I found I have a folder called ...