In certain places within Windows (usually the Registry), you'll see paths that begin with double question marks between backslashes, \??\. These are NT Object Manager object names. The Object Manager is a kernel-mode system that organizes various objects into a tree-like hierarchy. In other places, you may have seen path-like things that start with \Device\. Those are also Object Manager paths, and everything in the \??\ folder is actually a symbolic link to other places in the hierarchy. \??\C: links to the HarddiskVolumeN object for the volume holding your C drive, where N is a number. Only certain parts of Windows are designed to accept Object Manager paths, so you can't use them anywhere you would a normal path.
You can explore this hierarchy with the WinObj tool from Sysinternals.
Note that these paths are completely different than \\?\ paths, which are literal extended-length paths that you can use to access or create file system objects with weird characters in the name.
Based on my Super User answer.
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