explorer's navigation of filesystem hierarchy

The behaviour of windows explorer, as it navigates the filesystem, is a bit counter productive to my personal file system use. The particular behaviour that I would like to modify is the virtual root of the filesystem as seen by explorer. That sounds kind of obscure, sorry. Example: open explorer, keep hitting the up one level button, and soon you end up at Desktop. I'd rather the up button just move up the real file system hierarchy. For instance, if you open a folder on your desktop the address bar in explorer my read something like this

C:\Documents and Settings\cdavis\Desktop\downloads

if you go up one, you get the Desktop icon in the address bar. From there you can no longer go up, as if the Desktop were the root of the filesystem. To me, you should be able to hit the up button, from Desktop, and go to your home directory -- cdavis in this case. MyComputer has a similar interruption of the hiearchy as seen from explorer.

How can I make explorer simply navigate the true filesystem hierarchy?

 

my behaviour is different

Steve,

Thanks for the info, but my machines behaviour is different. I have two machines with XP that exhibit the behaviour I described in my post. I haven't done anything to them so I would "assume" ( at the accepted risk implied therein ) that I am operating on default behaviour.

the question is - how to modify the behaviour.



Chad

 

It grays out. But, I think, also important is how the address bar changes from a real path to the Desktop icon. Similarly to how it changes to MyComputer icon when you navigate to that location. I guess these are Window's logical layer on top of the true hierarchy of the filesystem.

I'm looking for a property on the Window's Explorer called "follow true hierarchy "