i remember an old trick with win95/98 was to use the extended ascii codes to type in characters that werent on a standard keyboard and for some reason windows wouldnt be able to do anything with the file....... i just couldnt read beyond its name, no files size, cant do anything to the files, there just stuck there. this only worked if you named the folder in dos (if you named it in windows it would do something that made it readable) then in dos you had to again rename the file to something normal to let windows read the file.......... take a look at 4DOS..... its a dos clone but has tabbed file name completion, in this way you can tell for sure if the file is really what its claiming to be........

just from the symptoms your stating thats what ive seen to do that so.......