Windows-based systems treat paths starting with '\' as absolute,
either referring to the current drive's root (e.g. "\foo" might
refer to "C:\foo") or to a network path (e.g. "\\host\foo"). On
the other hand, (most?) systems that are not based on Win32
accept backslashes as valid characters that may be part of the
filename, and thus we cannot treat them to identify absolute
paths.

Change the logic to only paths starting with '\' as absolute on
the Win32 platform. Add tests to avoid regressions and document
behaviour.