This will affect code paths using unc paths, e.g. "//server/share/mypath/myfile.txt" -- I don't see a bug being introduced here as long as expand_path works with unc paths (hard to believe that it doesn't), though it could add some performance overhead. Given that unc paths are remote 99.9% of the time, the local processing overhead of expand_path is probably ok, esp. given that longer term this code is being removed. So I would just verify that expand_path works fine with unc paths and this should be good.