In normal situations you cannot view the content of special folders, such as Windows/assembly or Windows/fonts, and so on. The way these folders are shown are set through the desktop.ini file in each of these folders, which is normally hidden and protected. One trick that I learned from here [+] is described below. Open a command prompt and type:

cd /d %windows%\assembly
attrib -r -h -s desktop.ini
ren desktop.ini desktop.bak

Using the above commands, we kill the desktop.ini file, which will cause Windows Explorer to successfully open and explore the real contents of the folder.