"My Documents" as system icon under Windows 95

[freakedenough]

I use Windows 95OSR2.1 on my 486 and I would like to add a "system icon" (like "My Computer","Network Neighborhood") to my Desktop and Explorer trees which opens "C:\My Documents" folder, similar to the later implementation of Windows 98+.

I've found something related to system icons here http://mc-computing.com/winexplorer/WinExplorerDesktopIcons.htm, however, it doesn't really explain me how to create own icons that eopen explorer with a specific folder.

A regular shortcut isn't displayed in the explorer tree, thus I don't want to use it.

 

[SomeGuy]

The My Documents folder wasn't really a thing until Office 97. On Windows 95 normally one would just get a shortcut on their desktop and then browse to that either from the desktop or directly from C:\.

The Windows 95 Explorer is flexible about system icons, but some piece of code has to actually handle clicking on it.

 

[Robbbert]

You could try copying the My Documents desktop icon from another version of Windows and pasting it to your Win95 desktop. No guarantees that it will work though.

I suggest this because I copied the Explorer icon that goes direct to My Computer over to various versions of windows and it works.

 

[commodorejohn]

I've never dug too much into this, but the built-in desktop icons are some kind of different beastie from normal shortcuts (which are actual filesystem objects of a couple different flavors - NTFS supports full-on softlinks, while on FAT16 they used files with a *.lnk extension which were treated specially by Windows. Can't remember if FAT32 added softlink support or not.) No idea exactly how the desktop shortcuts work, but I'm gonna guess they're controlled by a set of registry entries, as most seeming voodoo in the Win32 world is.

 

[Robbbert]

Please ignore my previous post - I misunderstood the question and it won't let me correct it.

I had a look in the registry between 95 and 98SE, and copied the relevant parts across. This gave an invalid My Documents desktop icon which does nothing.

So I think @SomeGuy is right - the required plumbing is just not there.

 

[doshea]

Some possible solutions:

Magic folder names

I seem to recall reading some tricks where if you gave a physical on-disk directory a certain name, it would function like a special folder like the Control Panel, and if you put that directory/folder in your Start Menu, it would actually expand out to show the Control Panel items in a submenu, unlike a regular shortcut (.lnk file) you might make via drag-and-drop which just opens the Control Panel in a window.

I think this information from https://discussions.virtualdr.com/s...w-do-you-make-a-shortcut-to-the-control-panel covers doing that:

Right click on the desktop > New > Folder
Right click on New Folder > Rename
Now, rename this folder as

ControlPanel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}

and press Enter and you'll get Control Panel on your desk top.

I didn't check that it's the right GUID or whatever it is, or test that this works, and I'm not sure which Windows version this requires but I'm pretty sure I did this sort of thing with some Windows 95 release (I could check but the VM is too much of a pain to start!).

I couldn't easily find a list of all those GUIDs or whatever they are to find out if there is one for "My Documents" though. Unfortunately a Google search for that special name mostly comes up with results saying how it's a great way to hide your directory's contents!

Develop a shell extension

If you're able and inclined to write some code, in MSDN library April 1997, SDK Documentation → Platform SDK → User Interface Services → Shell → Shell's Namespace → Extending the Shell's Namespace might be what you need to add this kind of thing, although I'm not totally sure.

 

[freakedenough]

So I finally got it to work by using a mydocs.dll from Windows 98 Beta. The trick does also work on NT 4.0 Workstation with a NT 5.0/2000 Alpha-Version of this DLL. They all have the IE4 shell enhancments in common, having them installed on 95/NT4 it was expected to work (and doesn't without them). You just need to copy the file over and regsvr32 them..



https://www.retrospace.net/infoseiten/readm.php?id=123 (I wrote a manual here, you may translate German to English)

One can register mydocs.dll (Version 4.71.1007.0) from Windows 2000 1592.1 on NT 4.0 and mydocs.dll (Version 4.71.0924.0) from Windows 98 1532 on Windows 95 by copying it to system32 (NT 4.0) or system (Windows 95) folder and executing
regsvr32 mydocs.dll (Start => Run)

It will default to %userprofile%\My Documents (NT 4.0) or C:\My Documents (Windows 95), but one can change the folder path via regedit (Settings UI is missing):

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders
Value Name: Personal
Value Type: REG_SZ
Value Data: complete path to storage location (e.g. D:\Documents)

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders
Value Name: Personal
Value Type: REG_SZ
Value Data: complete path to storage location (e.g. D:\Documents)


Hope I could help others.