Based on the answers I received at superuser, it’s clear that I’ll have to add the following to a custom Explorer Window launcher. I want to launch a rooted explorer view, and for just that window make the navigation pane look like the old Windows XP folders pane. I already wrote a program to place shortcuts to these folder views on the Start Menu, so changing the shortcuts to run through a launcher is trivial.
Here’s the XP folders pane:

Here’s the Windows 7 Navigation Pane:

(source: 280z28.org)
Okay well I haven’t got the time to completely finish this code (and it is in C# which I have no idea is what you want, but you didn’t really specify). The basic premise of this is hosting the ExplorerBrowser control inside a .NET Form (using the WindowsAPICodePack which you will need to get and add a reference to), wait around till the TreeView has been created and subclassing the window to allow us to intercept the item insertations.
Unfortunately nothing is ever simple, the text doesn’t give you a direct idea of what the item is (cause they do not set it), what you would need to do is get the PIDL from the
insertStruct.lParamand parse it into something meaningful, probably using theIShellFolderinterface. You can then selectively remove items (by returning 0 as them.Result) and you can intercept anything else you need to. You would think there would be a simple solution but I guess your luck isn’t in 😉 Hope it helps slightly.An alternative might be do similar (host explorer directly) but use something like detours to hook the registry functions and selectively change the view the explorer control gets allowing some of the registry tweaking to work.