I definitely don't think this is static. A few days ago, I was working on a teacher's laptop. There's a bug in XP when a profile is created from Default User (this is the case with everyone who logs into our domain using our login scripts) where the start menu from "All Programs" refuses to build. It's really strange and I'm not exactly sure of the precise cause, but it's easy to fix on most machines.
You go into another profile (usually "Administrator," which is a local account), copy the NTUSER.DAT file from there over the top of the one contained in the glitched profile.
When I opened the folder in explorer, the file didn't appear; this wasn't surprising, since it was a new laptop. No one had enabled "show all files" or disabled "hide system files." I did so, refreshed the window, but to no avail. NTUSER.DAT was still invisible. I even restarted explorer (end task -> new task "explorer") and rebooted the machine. It still didn't work.
This was rather puzzling, since it's shown on every other machine I've had to do it on (including my own, for other reasons). I opened up a DOS window, navigated into the teacher's profile and ran dir. Nothing. Intuitively, I next tried dir /a. There it was. NTUSER.DAT, nice and cozy inside of the teacher's profile. I tried doing copy through DOS (with extra parameters, obviously), but it wouldn't work! I even tried safe mode. It wasn't worth getting into the recovery console over. I just made a copy of her profile and copied the entire Administrator profile over the old copy. That worked.
Conclusively, there are obviously ways to "edit" which files explorer chooses to hide.