It seems I just found out a bug, but not yet sure where this comes from (no truckloads of git-grep-foo yet, I'll look in a minute). Nevermind, it was an own module subdirectory causing this :s I'll leave the message nonetheless in case somebody didn't know that at all. I'm tinkering about with Openvox, and 2/2 Windows installations hit this:

/File[C:/ProgramData/PuppetLabs/puppet/cache/lib/aux]/ensure

change from 'characterSpecial' to 'directory' failed: Could not remove files of type characterSpecial

[...]

Could not set 'file' on ensure: No such file or directory - A directory component in C:/ProgramData/PuppetLabs/puppet/cache/lib/aux/gpg_answers20250223-5724-cj15oa.lock does not exist or is a dangling symbolic link

Now, after a lot of trying where there's a hidden file or something I saw this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/naming-a-file?redirectedfrom=MSDN A file or folder called 'aux' is simply not allowed. Great design, but it is what it is. What confused me further was... my workplace uses PE, I cannot recall right off the bat if this ever was an issue, but here inside a from-scratch environment this happens.