It's not just Mediawiki that does it, any random page with a colon in it will
cause the error.  Furthermore, the url does not have to correspond to any file
or service on the computer.  Error messages are as follows:

[Sat Feb 17 12:55:50 2007] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] (20024)The given path
misformatted or contained invalid characters: Cannot map GET
/wiki/Special:Specialpages HTTP/1.1 to file, referer:
http://127.0.0.1/wiki/Main_Page

[Sat Feb 17 23:39:40 2007] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] (20024)The given path
misformatted or contained invalid characters: Cannot map GET
/testing:colons:and:stuff HTTP/1.1 to file

The underlying idea was to prevent people from referencing DOS style device 
names, e.g. C: which could create havoc

Unfortunately, MediaWiki started out life on Linux / Unix platforms, and they 
decided to use colons for namespaces.

Can we get an Apache httpd.conf option which allows us to selectively switch 
off this warning, maybe according to regex matching of the URL path (or even 
just the virtual path prefix) ?

While device names could be a small problem, the more treacherous problem is
NTFS data streams - as described in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/105763

These are prone to misuse.

Apache 2.2 (actually the APR test_safe_name() function) intentionally disallows
the ":" character within a URI on Windows. 

Also, the Windows FindFirstFile() function will return ERROR_INVALID_NAME
instead of ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND for any name attempting data stream access using
the ":" character.

The choice of the ":" character as the namespace separator in MediaWiki was an
unfortunate one for use on Windows.

setup: WinXP, Apache 2.2.4

url: "http://localhost/:" (anything with a colon)
browser: Forbidden You don't have permission to access /: on this server.
error.log: (20024)The given path misformatted or contained invalid characters:
Cannot map GET /: HTTP/1.1 to file

these urls also cause "Forbidden":
url: "http://localhost/ /" (any only-space path segment)
url: "http://localhost/ ?"
url: "http://localhost/ #"

.htaccess:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.html [L]


..if only the filename safety check didn't come to play before the mod_rewrite..

Crazy question, did you try a [PT] rewrite rule to knock out the offending ':'?

My fixing, recompiled libapr and replaced libarp-1.dll in my apache.

char tmpname[APR_FILE_MAX * 3 + 1];
HANDLE hFind;
if ((rv = test_safe_name(fname)) != APR_SUCCESS) {
    return APR_FROM_OS_ERROR(ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND); //rv;
}
hFind = FindFirstFileW(wfname, &FileInfo.w);
if (hFind == INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE)
    return APR_FROM_OS_ERROR(ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND); //apr_get_os_error();
FindClose(hFind);
if (unicode_to_utf8_path(tmpname, sizeof(tmpname), 
                         FileInfo.w.cFileName)) {
    return APR_ENAMETOOLONG;
}
filename = apr_pstrdup(pool, tmpname);

I think the issue here is that ':' in the original URI always causes the 
warning, even when the URI is eventually rewritten to another one without 
the ':'.
The warning simply needs to be downgraded to a debug message (which is normally 
suppressed) or removed altogether. Or there needs to be a flag to turn it off.

Windows XP, apache 2.2.4

http://host/foo:bar, http://host/foo%3Abar, http://host/%F0%FF -- not working 
((22)Invalid argument: Cannot map GET /%F0%FF HTTP/1.1 to file)

but

http://host/zoo/foo:bar, http://host/zoo/foo%3Abar, http://host/zoo/%F0%FF works
fine

Comment 8 has nothing to do with this report; please don't confuse bugs by
layering on multiple issues.

To the commentor - it fails because httpd on win32 requires you to specific
non-ASCII filenames in UTF-8, corresponding to the Unicode filesystem of Win32.

Confirming that problem still exists in Apache 2.2.8 (PHP 5.2.5) on Windows 2003 Server.

It would be great to have some way to turn this off so it doesn't spam the error.log....

Confirming that problem still exists in Apache 2.2.11 (PHP 5.2.8) on Windows
2003 Server.

Error log:

[Mon Jan 26 20:53:45 2009] [error] [client 10.x.x.x] (20024)The given path is misformatted or contained invalid characters: Cannot map GET /mwiki/index.php/Special:SpecialPages HTTP/1.1 to file, referer: http://ssdev.student.stanmore.ac.uk/mwiki/index.php/User_talk:WikiSysop

(In reply to comment #4)
> RewriteEngine On
> RewriteRule ^.*$ index.html [L]
> 
> 
> ..if only the filename safety check didn't come to play before the mod_rewrite..
> 

Have you tried without htaccess? It makes your rules run much later, where they can't suppress the "translate_name" in the core of apache.

Windows 7 
Apache 2.2.11

Same problem with "|" character.

and it's need a third level to overcome bug:


http://host/foo|bar          -Forbidden
http://host/soo/foo|bar      -Forbidden
http://host/too/soo/foo|bar  -Norm

On Windows Vista Apache 2.2.14, these urls also cause "Forbidden":

http://localhost/n\
http://localhost/n\n
http://localhost/n/n\
http://localhost/n/n\n
http://localhost/n/n/n/n/n/n/n\n

Folks, this won't be addressed until httpd learns the concept of "not a file"
resource, al la contextual DocumentRoot per Location/VirtualHost.  E.g. a
proxy-only namespace, or something run exclusively through a special handler.

Congratulations for choosing Win32 and we are pleased to provide that port.
However, the same porters would strongly encourage you to choose a system with 
fewer potential naming-related security issues if you must work around these
issues.  httpd is at the mercy of the underlying filesystem.

WRT comment #14, Zéfling, see AllowEncodedSlashes and AcceptPathInfo; we suspect
yours is a simple misconfiguration or unusual assumptions.  However, in httpd
the backslash is not a pathname separator, and the file handler will not
accept it as such.  As an argument to your cgi script, it is accepted.

(In reply to William A. Rowe Jr. from comment #15)
> Folks, this won't be addressed until httpd learns the concept of "not a file"
> resource, al la contextual DocumentRoot per Location/VirtualHost.  E.g. a
> proxy-only namespace, or something run exclusively through a special handler.


Why is that?

This persists in httpd 2.4.25.

The NTFS feature in question is called alternate data streams: https://blog.malwarebytes.com/101/2015/07/introduction-to-alternate-data-streams/
In short, with NTFS a file's contents constitutes its default data stream. But other data streams can be stored in file metadata. These streams are named. For example, "C:\file.txt:history" would refer to the data stream called "history" of the file C:\file.txt.

William, why was this marked as resolved?