This one really threw me off tonight.  I am running Windows Server 2008 on one of my boxes and I was trying to set up some advanced URL Routing on IIS7.  IIS7 Manager has a very nice easy to use GUI interface, but I prefer working directly in the configuration files.

I fire up my Notepad++ and attempt to open a file through the file browser.  I navigate to the IIS config folder (c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\config\) and I see an empty directory.  Huh? How is that possible?!

Now I switch over to Windows Explorer and go to the same folder as above and to my disbelief… there are all the config files.  Ok now I am truly confused!

Conclusion

While I cannot seem to find anything from Microsoft about this issue, my findings are that 32-bit applications cannot see the entire file system!  I installed a few applications that I know are only 32-bit to verify this and sure enough they all suffered from the exact same issue. 

Files simply do not show up and if you attempt to open the file (because you do know the full path & filename), it simply tells you that the file does not exist.