You might have been searching for a specific folder using the search mechanism included in Windows Explorer, and when you found what you wanted, you copied it from the Search Results list and pasted it as a shortcut into another folder. When you click on this shortcut to open your folder, the folder opens, but the address bar of Windows Explorer does not report its actual location, but its location in the Search Results! If you try to go up the directory tree in order to reach the host folder, Explorer goes instead to the Search Results list!

Not only are you stuck in the search list, but also each time you try to use shortcuts created from the list, you may open the list itself, and have Windows repeat the same search! To repair such shortcuts is simple, as I discovered accidentally!

If you right-click on a shortcut created from Search Results and go to the second tab (shortcut), you will see in the “target” box that the address of the folder that the shortcut points at is correct! Yet, when you click the shortcut in order to open this folder, the folder does not open in the address reported in the shortcut target!

Right when you have the properties of the shortcut open, and you are in the second tab viewing the shortcut “target”, just copy the address reported as target of the shortcut, and paste it again in the same place, in the shortcut “target” box. Confirm the ‘change’ pressing the OK button, and you are done! Nothing seems to have changed. The shortcut “target” box reports the same address as before, yet now when you click the shortcut you open its proper target location!