Does the folder C:/.../AppData/VirtualStore/ emulate anything?

Question

I recently installed two old PC games: Elder Scrolls Morrowind and Battlefield 2 :) However when I started looking for my Morrowind save file I could not find it in the usual places e.g. Documents folder. I had to perform a search on the entire C drive and eventually found that the two games stored their save files in C:/.../AppData/Local/VirtualStore/Program Files (x86)/. These games were targeting Windows 2K/XP and I'm playing them on 8.1. The location of these files and the folder name 'VirtualStore' suggest some emulation. Is this so?

Answer 1

Ever since Windows Vista, applications that are not running with raised privileges that try to write to the Program Files (or Program Files (x86)) folder will in fact write to the VirtualStore folder, unknowingly.

Microsoft thought that this would be better than a program failure (caused by the access restriction). And indeed, thanks to this, most old programs that save their settings in the Program Files folder will continue to work with Windows Vista+, and each user will get her own settings, as a bonus, even though the original software manufacturer did not think of this.

Source/More Info

Answer 2

Windows versions starting with, I believe, Vista started to lock down write access to Program Files as users were no longer administrators by default. So that old applications that expected the user to be administrators continued to work, registry and file system virtualization was put in place. Writes and reads to protected locations are transparently redirected to user-specific locations, as you have seen.