Incorrect file creation date in Windows XP/Vista

Solution 1:

This appears to be a documented feature called File System Tunneling. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/172190 for details on this and how to disable it via a registry setting.

Solution 2:

I don't believe this is a bug, I think it's by design. I ran into this a few months ago myself.

Consider an application that creates a temporary, working copy of the file you just opened. As you're working, your changes are written to the temp file. When you're finished and choose to save the file, the application deletes the original and renames or copies the temp file to the original file name. It's not terribly common, but it's not uncommon (many old and simple applications work this way...text editors and the like).

In the above case, every time you saved a file, its creation date would always match last modified!

I dunno what kinda junk is going on behind the scenes, perhaps somebody with some insight will provide more details. As an aside, some file systems don't store creation dates at all, only modified and accessed dates (ext2, for instance).

Update: I found the following from the writers of xxcopy, at http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy15.htm , which might apply to what you're doing:

Since the use of the File-Create date has serious problems, we generally discourage the use if this date

Problems with the file creation date (File-Create date),

The problems of the File-Create date can be traced back to the inconsistency in Microsoft's various file management utilities. It seems that the purpose of three distinct
variations in the file date values were never clearly defined by the designer of the feature. We as software developers have not come across any official documents on this subject.