What is the first character in the sort order used by Windows Explorer?

The first visible character is '!' according to ASCII table.And the last one is '~'So "!file.doc" or "~file.doc' will be the top one depending your ranking order.You can check the ascii table here:http://www.asciitable.com/

Edit: This answer is based on the opinion of the author and not facts.

I had the same problem. I wanted to 'bury' a folder at the bottom of the sort instead of bringing it to the top with the '!' character. Windows recognizes most special characters as just that, 'special', and therefore they ALL are sorted at the top.

However, if you think outside of the English characters, you will find a lot of luck. I used Character Map and the arial font, scrolled down past '~' and the others to the greek alphabet. Capitol Xi, Ξ, worked best for me, but I didn't check to see which was the actual 'lowest' in the sort.

If you google for sort order windows explorer you will find out that Windows Explorer (since Windows XP) obviously uses the function StrCmpLogicalW in the sort order "by name". I did not find information about the treatment of the underscore character. I was amused by the following note in the documentation:

Behavior of this function, and therefore the results it returns, can change from release to release. ...