Directory Tree - Generates a list of subdirectories.

[Bonnie West]

As what comes to hard/soft/symbolic links or junctions - it seems that there is none, other than those Windows OS generated ones (All Users, Application Data, Documents etc.).
Users typically are not creating/defining those, neither do engineering or other apps we use.

Yeah, junctions and symbolic links are generally underused in Windows. Mounted folders, however, might be slightly more common.

Briefly checked and did not find dot containing folder names from Notepad++ or Gimp installations, Java nor Pale Moon browser we don't even run.

• GIMP created ".gimp-2.8" and ".thumbnails" folders under my user profile folder.
• Java created "jre1.8.0_51" and "jre1.8.0_60" folders under its installation directory.
• Pale Moon (and most likely other FireFox based browsers) created 2 "*.default" folders under the 2 "Profiles" folder in the "AppData" directory.
• Notepad++ created a "user.manual" folder under its installation directory.
• Finally, and I don't know how this got into my system, Microsoft (?) created a "Microsoft.NET" folder in the "Program Files" directory.

The point Peter Swinkels and I are trying make is that the "*." pattern is not a totally fool-proof way of filtering out files and returning folders only. Even if your users were told to avoid using the dot character in their folder names, some programs may just be out of your control. FindFirstFile et al. are probably not the best choice for you if you require both rapid searching and folders-only enumeration.