New ? Old ? DOS bug or virus ?

My OS is Windows 8.1 Pro. I keep everything upto-date and I have Norton 360, using that for several years.

Lately when, from the 'Command' Window, I do a DOS full C: search for some wildcard item, e.g. dir *.txt /s /p, I get a screen full of warnings about file path/name being too long.

On investigating this I found that it applies only to files and directories under the Appdata\Local tree. Behind that there is no problem.

What my investigation exposes is the endless copying of a directory called 'Application Data' each one in in the current Application Data directory; and, containing the exact same files. IOW a mirror of the parent directory.

Here is a screen copy from the DOS window in 8.1 Pro, which shows the weird nesting, BTW I could have gone on for ever creating directories by simply typing the command 'dir'.

C:\Users\*\AppData\Local\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data
>cd application data

C:\Users\*\AppData\Local\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data
\Application Data> cd application data

C:\Users\*\AppData\Local\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data
\Application Data\Application Data>cd application data

C:\Users\*\AppData\Local\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data
\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data>cd application data

C:\Users\*\AppData\Local\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data
\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data>

And finally this does not appear in the GUI screen in Explorer. IOW there are no subdirectories of the name 'Application Data' listed there at all, even with the selection of show 'Hidden Files' in the File Explorer settings bar.