XnView Software

Seems to fixed in 1.01.

Sorry to have wasted your time.

Windows preinstalled with Polish and switched to English later on (some programs automatically use English and some use Polish, depending on the way they determine the locale - AFAIU there's at least two variables for this, one for 'what language was the original Windows installation' and the other ...

Maybe it depends on the locale?

I can corroborate. According to my experiments, archives with Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese characters or an em dash (or fancy quotation signs, etc.) in their filename open in the way described in the initial post, as an empty folder. The filenames *inside* the archive do not seem to matter.

Oddly ...