[rleigh]

Not if it's a CIFS mount on a UNIX platform. I'm sure there are other examples. In practice, most software copes just fine with this arrangement.

I suspect that the breakage would be fairly limited, and I for one would love for this to happen. The amount of stuff which can't be done because of this design decision is huge; proper package management without numerous reboots would be one, and I think the benefit of that and having semantics common with Unix platforms would outweigh the breakage.