IE: The Bizarre and Unhappy Story of 'file:' URLs (blogs.msdn.com)

Just FYI, I think this post may have been written by Zeke of "Asking to use the bathroom" fame (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=711709).

Blog narrative is retarded, this is no Homer's Iliad.

The blog's layout truncates the useful information in his post:

Call shlwapi like this: PathCreateFromUrl(pszUrl, pszPath, cchPath, dwFlags);