Reparse point
Reparse points matter more than they sound. A redirected Desktop folder — common when OneDrive backs up the desktop, or when the user profile has been moved to another drive — is a reparse point, and so is any junction or symbolic link someone has placed on the desktop.
Why DeskDrawer cares#
Anything that might live on an unreachable network share has to be handled off the interface thread, or the application freezes while Windows waits for a timeout. But treating everything redirected as potentially remote is equally wrong: a junction pointing at a folder on the same disk is local, fast, and needs the ordinary code path with live file-system watching.
DeskDrawer therefore reads the reparse target and classifies on that, rather than on the mere presence of a redirect. Getting this distinction wrong is what produced two regressions in version 1.2.5, described in Three attempts at one check: reparse points, OneDrive and the desktop.