Win2K/NTFS messes file creation time/date

["Acryl" <abusement2 () gmx net>]

Heyo all ...

First of all I'm not too sure whether this actually belongs here and whether
it has been posted already, so please excuse me if any of these two applies.
Since it at least partly affects "data" integrity, I think posting it here
is not all too wrong. I notified Microsoft about 2 weeks ago and received no
response yet.

I accidently stumbled accross this error when I made a program of mine
create 3 text files containing different debug output. My explorer is set to
detailed view showing: Creation time/date, Last modification time/date and
last access time/date. This way the bug I'll describe is easy to recognize
so I'd recommend setting it to the same properties when trying to reproduce
this.

When I ran my program the very first time it created the 3 text files and
set all of the 3 values properly as the should.
After viewing the files I deleted them (Shift + Del) by hand and reran the
program.
Again the 3 files were created, but the Creation time/date was set wrong,
namely it was set to the very first creation time ( before I deleted them by
hand ).
Any following runs of the program produced the same results.

The error was not reproducable with 100% certainity using the explorer only,
but I found a way that causes the error to happen in most cases ( ~ 19 out
of 20 ).

Create a new directory somewhere on a NTFS partition.
Create a text file (i.e. test1.txt ) using the context-menu.
Wait until more than one minute passed and create a second text file named
test2.txt.
Now both files should show the correct creation time/date as it should be.
Now delete test1.txt and rename test2.txt to test1.txt afterwards.
Now the error should appear. While last access and last modification
timestamps of former test2.txt should stay intact, the creation timestamp
should change to the one of the ( now deletet ) test1.txt.

This error also occured when using files which creation timestamps were
differing by months.

I tested this on serveral Win2K boxes with SP2 installed.

- Kimon