The (revised, tested, working) attached patch solves the cross-platform Pathname serialization problem by eliminating the output of '' characters in namestrings as they are all now interpreted and converted to '/' regardless of platform.
1. UNC paths now have problems. My proposal would be that UNC paths always use the "unprintable namestring" representation when I figure out what that should be like
2. No convenience function to convert a namestring to Windows '' forms. Since Windows accepts '/' as a directory separator is this really necessary?