Eric, the sooner the better as far as I'm concerned.
In my quick read of the patch I didn't see any translating from the Win32 namespace to the NT namespace; do you plan to do anything there?
To pick a (bad) example, the name \server\share\file is valid in the Win32 namespace, but not in the NT namespace; it must be translated to ??\UNC\server\share\file
Since you mentioned SMB, I will too: don't worry too much, it's currently broken anyway. As long as the code's cleaner it should be easier to fix (and this looks much cleaner).
--Juan
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