The Old New Thing - Site Home - MSDN Blogs
Windows Setup takes advantage of hard links. A large percentage of the files installed by Windows are hard-linked to copies in the C:\Windows\WinSxS directory for reasons I do not understand, but the phrase "component store" may be part of it. (This is why asking Explorer for the size of the C:\Windows directory gives a misleading view of the actual amount of disk space occupied by Windows, because Explorer uses a naive algorithm which counts each hard link as a separate file.) Oh, and in Windows 7, the two copies of Notepad are now hard links to each other.