About a month and a half ago the following change was committed to CVS:
r20659 (orig r20659): troy | 2005-06-06 09:20:44 +1000
Huw Davies huw@codeweavers.com If a folder is selected on Open then browse into it, otherwise we should return the path in the edit box whether that be a folder or a file. Don't add extensions to a folder.
One of the effects of this appears to be that when browsing for a file, you can no longer type in the name of an existing directory and be taken straight to that directory. Since Windows allows this, this seems to be somewhat less than desirable.
Additionally it seems a lot of the code for FILEDLG95_OnOpen makes direct calls to the API in cases where the IShellFolder interface could provide the same information. It seems to me that the IShellFolder interfaces should be preferred in such situations because the IShellFolder object is best positioned to know how to process a path given the current context. For instance, if we are browsing the Unix heirarchy then the UNIXFS implementation of IShellFolder might want to allow the user to enter UNIX directory paths (and probably *should*, since that's the type of path we are effectively presenting to the user).