I wa playing around yesterday, trying to find a way to add a shortcut to my Windows 7 taskbar that would take me to a folder without having it tacked into the preexisting Explorer shortcut.

It turned out to be easier than I thought it was going to be.

If you would like to do the same, begin by creating a new shortcut to the folder.

Right Click on your new shortcut and choose properties

What we need to do now is change this from a plain old folder link into a shortcut that invokes an application. Specifically, Windows Explorer.

In the “Target” section

Add “%windir%\explorer.exe ” to the very beginning, without the quotes and with the single space at the end. Then remove the quotes around the target folder, so it looks like this:

For non techy types, the %windir% is what is called a path. It was set up automatically when you installed Windows 7 and just directs to where Windows is installed, which is generally C:\Windows, but not always.

In the “Start in” section, add the “%windir%” (no quotes) path again. Your final product should look something like this:

If you would like to make the icon for the shortcut be something different, click on change icon and change it to whatever you want.

Click on ok, then right click on the folder again and choose “Pin to Task Bar.”

You should now have a nice, new shortcut to the folder that is not stacked inside the existing Explorer shortcut.

Now if only I could figure out how to make the contents appear like a Stack on OS X.