If the target of a shortcut moves, the Windows shell will try to
find the new location; this is known as "resolving" the
shortcut. But what algorithm does the shell use to find that
target? The answer: It depends. When shortcuts were introduced
in Windows 95, file systems did not have a lot of smarts
associated with object tracking. The Windows 95 shell uses a
simple searching algorithm to find the lost shortcut
destination: When a shortcut is created, various properties of
the target of the shortcut are recorded in the shortcut file
itself—properties such as the file name, file size, creation
time and the last-modified time, as well as information about
the drive containing the file. These properties are updated
periodically when the shortcut is used, and when the target of
the shortcut goes missing, the shell starts searching for a file
with as many properties as possible in common with the intended
target file. When it finds a file that looks similar enough to
the original target, it declares the target as