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I'm trying to create a shortcut to a specific folder on my XBox360 devkit. I can navigate to the folder, and alt-drag a shortcut into Windows, just like any other folder. But this shortcut doesn't work. Double-clicking it does nothing.

The only way I've found to get to the XBox folder is to open up XBox Neighborhood and navigate down to the folder - and I have to redo this every time I reboot the machine, because unlike local folders, it is not saved when Windows shuts down. It's a pretty long series of folders to go down through, and it's easy to get lost in the deep folder tree we have set up. Is there any way to set up a shortcut to an XBox folder from Windows?

Alternatively, a shortcut that I could put at the root of the XBox would be almost as good. Just don't want to have to always navigate all the way down through all those folders over and over again.

Darrel Hoffman
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Unfortunately the Xbox 360 Neighborhood shell extension doesn't officially support creating shortcuts to folders on the console. When I try to use a shortcut to neighborhood, I always get a message saying Catastrophic failure. There's also no mention of shortcut creation in the documentation.

I've been fiddling around with the shell extension and rundll32.exe, and I've stumbled upon this unofficial solution:

"C:\Windows\system32\rundll32.exe" "C:\Windows\system32\xeshlext.dll",LaunchExplorer xbox://XDK\DEVKIT\Samples\Dolphin

Replace XDK with your devkit name and DEVKIT\Samples\Dolphin with the path to the folder you want to open (note that you must use backslashes here).

You can either create a new shortcut and use the above as the path, or you can create a .bat file and place the above in it. You can also run this from command prompt, of course.

If you create a shortcut and want the proper icon, you can find the Xbox 360 folder icon in C:\Windows\system32\xeshlext.dll:

enter image description here

I found this shortcut solution by looking at the registry and examining xeshlext.dll in a hex editor.

Xenon
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  • Might be a slight improvement. The other thing this just made me think of is I might be able to set up a .bat file to do this - though not sure if you can run console commands on the 360. Will have to wait until Monday to try it though - office is closed for Thanksgiving break. – Darrel Hoffman Nov 22 '12 at 13:29
  • @DarrelHoffman I believe I have now found the best possible solution, and have edited my answer. I hope you manage to get this working. – Xenon Nov 23 '12 at 08:08
  • Thanks - I'll test this on Monday and get back to you. Looks like it should work though. Just can't test it from home. – Darrel Hoffman Nov 24 '12 at 03:14
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    That's pretty close to perfect. Only difference between this and a regular shortcut is it won't open in the same window, but I can live with that. Certainly far superior to what I was having to do before. I wonder why they didn't include such a basic feature by default? – Darrel Hoffman Nov 26 '12 at 15:09