The image that you’re seeing on the folder is actually a little piece of chain to indicate that the folder is (or Sublime thinks it is) a symlink to some other folder. Essentially when Sublime is building the catalog of files if it discovers that one folder is a link to a different folder that it’s already seen, it flags it at a link and skips looking inside to avoid a potential infinite loop (imagine if a subfolder linked to it’s parent, for example).
If you right click on such a folder, the menu will have an option labeled Reveal Link Source that will show you what folder this folder links to. Also if you check the console (View > Show Console) you can see messages in there about this:
scan: /tmp/bob/deleteme/c has been seen before, skipping (using inode) previous path: /tmp/bob/deleteme/b inode: 790549
Generally if you see this with things that aren’t links it’s because the file system that’s being used isn’t correctly identifying folders as being unique. For example the log above is from my Linux box, where the file system has a unique inode for every folder. However remote mounted file systems like sshfs can sometimes “fake” that sort of information in a way that makes Sublime think multiple folders are actually the same thing.
That seems like what might be happening for you, since the result seems different each time.
I’m not sure that there’s any way to resolve that other than at the file system level though; as far as I’m aware Sublime doesn’t have any setting that tells it to ignore it’s own restriction on re-scanning already seen folders.
As such the general advice is to try a different method of mounting the file system remotely (or maybe there’s a setting that can be tweaked in the file share server to resolve the issue).
