It's taken me a while to figure out what was going wrong, but I think I've got it.
I have been reorganizing my filesystems, and the "copy" function has locked up on me a LOT. CPU use spikes, but task manager says it's all in the "idle" process. "Cancel" and "pause" have no impact, except that the descriptive text changes. Eventually, I have to reboot the computer.
I haven't been able to *prove* that it's copying links that has a problem, but if I don't copy links the copy goes fine, but when I do copy links (at least these particular links), the copy locks up.
When I tried to test the behavior, I *did* notice a *drastic* slow-down in copying just a few files; so it may be that it's not actually locking up, just that copying a large number of files "below" a link takes a drastically long time to "calculate" - more than a day for less than 10GB of data.
Here is how I ran the test that failed, but did take longer to copy than expected:
* brand new windows 8 vm (virtualbox), all updates applied and less than ten extra programs installed.
* in an elevated command prompt:
CD \
mkdir temp
cd temp
mkdir test
mklink /d t test
Then in windows explorer, I copied "C:\Temp" to "C:\Temp - copy" by drag-and-drop. The copy worked just fine.
I deleted "C:\Temp - copy" and "C:\Temp\t" then went back to the elevated command prompt and:
cd \temp
mklink /j t test
Again, windows explorer copied just fine. I deleted "C:\Temp - copy" but left "C:\Temp\t"
So, using drag-and-drop, I copied all of the files from my "downloads" folder to "C:\Temp\t"
This time when I copied (in Explorer using drag-and-drop) "C:\Temp" to "C:\" (creating "C:\Temp - copy"), the copy process to ten times (maybe more, maybe less...I didn't fire up a stopwatch) as long as it did to copy all of my files from downloads to "C:\Temp\T".
That is copying *one* link with 9 files - the big problem shows up if I'm copying more than one link, multiple sub-folders under the link and even links in sub-folders.
(I am using my linked folders to keep web site libraries in one place instead of maintaining multiple versions; I download my javascript libraries like jQuery and knockout to a common "libraries" folder, then create links to the libraries sub-folders for each web site).
Please contact me if you have any questions!