What would the deepest directory on a Windows operating system be called and how would one go about accessing it?
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It would still be called a directory and it would depend on your definition of "deepest". There is a path limit of 260 characters but that is not the actual limit of nested directories. There are APIs available that let you circumvent that limit but it depends on the software and how it's implementing file access.
To test it create a item (directory or file) with a name that is near that 260 character limit and move it into a folder so that it's still not exceeding the 260 character limit. After that you can Cut and Paste that folder into a folder with a longer name (so the path to the item would exceed that 260 character limit) and you would have a file which might be accessible by some (Total Commander) but not all Software (Explorer).
You could also look into the following SuperUser question for some insight on how many files can be stored using NTFS which is probably indicative of the max depth of a directory structure - assuming you don't store anthing else on a partition: Max files per directory on NTFS vol vs FAT32
How NTFS Works would suggest:
Files per volume 4,294,967,295 (2³² minus 1 file)
