Yes, I said "&–v‰è“c". In restoring a couple of Preferences with Time Machine I found a folder, inside the Preferences folder, called "&–v‰è“c". The folder didn't contain anything...well, nothing visible.

Any idea what this is?

Do you use an Epson scanner and/or Photoshop or Photoshop Elements?

We've had a number of cases over the years in which some combination of the above created empty folders in ~/Library/Preferences with nonsense names.

Yes, on both counts. I have an Epson scanner and I have Photoshop Elements. Thanks. For a moment there I thought I was going to have to study ancient runes.

Yep, this is a well-known bug with Epson's scanner and printer driver software. It's been long-standing for years, and Epson's never fixed it.

If you want to know the technical details, when the Epson scanner or printer driver software runs, it creates temporary files to spool print jobs or save scanner data. These really ought to be stored in the temporary directory in OS X, but they're not. Worse, the software doesn't use the correct character encoding for the filenames of the files, so the filenames end up looking like gibberish.