Folder shortcuts in Vista?

[Jeff Vandervoort]

Windows 2000 & XP supported a somewhat obscure feature called Folder
Shortcuts. Since it's a bit of an obscure feature...please let me clarify I
am NOT describing a shortcut to a folder! Unlike a shortcut to a folder,
Windows adds a Folder Shortcut to its namespace. It appears in the "Save In"
dropdown in file dialogs, and in the left pane treeview in Explorer, just
like My Documents, Control Panel, Desktop and other "special" folders.

But in Vista, Folder Shortcuts that work just fine in XP "degrade" into
their component parts: A normal shortcut named target.lnk and a desktop.ini
file contained in a normal folder. I've verified the folder's read-only flag
is set. Needless to say, they do not appear in the Windows namespace,
either.

Is there any replacement for Folder Shortcuts in Vista?

 

[Ronnie Vernon MVP]

Jeff

In the Save As dialog box, the section on the left side where the folders
appear is called the Places Bar. In XP this could easily be configured with
places like folders by using the TweakUI utility which isn't available in
Vista.

Another way to configure what appeared in the Places Bar was to use the
Group Policy Editor. All of the options for this bar are still in GPEdit and
can likely be configured there. I haven't tested this in Vista.

The following website goes into detail about this subject and if you look at
Method 3 there, it explains where all of these GPEdit options are located.
In the other methods, it describes the registry locations for the shortcuts
in XP.

Edit the Places bar locations in Open/Save As boxes:
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/PlacesBar.htm

 

[Jeff Vandervoort]

Thanks for your reply, Ronnie

The question was about Folder Shortcuts, which are (very) different than the
Places Bar. For that matter, the question is also about Vista, which doesn't
have a Places Bar; it has Favorite Links and a folder tree. But I just
stumbled onto the answer to my own question by mistake!

If I right-click empty space in the Computer folder and choose Add a Network
Location, it creates the Vista equivalent of an XP Folder Shortcut, which I
can then move to the location I prefer. At a quick glance, I suspect the
reason the XP one didn't work correctly is a difference in the desktop.ini
file within it, but I've not compared it to an XP Folder Shortcut to see.
Target.lnk and the read-only attribute on the containing folder work the
same way. So I think I'm on my way to being able to deploy this to corporate
desktops.