To your last question: Pro/E has its own favorites system for its file browser. I don't have the help with me, but will look tomorrow as to how to add items.
As to why not: there are two factors to blame (besides just not wanting to spend the money)
The first is that Pro/E was originally developed on UNIX related OSs and UNIX has real symbolic links. Windows has 'short cuts'. The difference is that short cuts require secondary interpretation (as you noted) and symbolic links are at the OS level so every app that can read a file or a directory can use them. Pro/E was born without needing shortcut training wheels. (Added in Win 95) (Also, NTFS does support the MS version of symbolic links, but they are not simple to use, unlike UNIX.)
A further part of this is that many Windows apps use the windows routines for getting filenames, but most Windows apps don't have to gather other files. The apps that do gather other files maintain links to those files using the full pathname (not shortcuts) and have to have tools to re-create those links (e.g. Excel) Again, going back to UNIX, there were no Windows routines to browse for filenames and so PTC wrote their own and haven't needed to change them.
The second one is that PTC has Windchill, which gives some real access control to the WC manager, which won't use OS level shortcuts anyway.
See the Wikipedia article "File_shortcut" for more. Honestly, it's a quagmire designed to cope with the movement of a single user operating system into a multi-user environment without losing all those great Win 3.1 applications, though the article points out its origin in having the application located in one part of the directory structure and allowing the icon for launching the application to be in another location.
Still hanging on? www flexhex com/docs/articles/hard-links.phtml Covers hardlinks, softlinks, and shortcuts. That should do it.
