How to get Nav Pane to stay in Quick Access area?

Question

How do I get the Navigation Pane to stay on a chosen folder in the Quick Access (eg. "WorkStuff"), instead of moving down to the Drive that holds the original "WorkStuff" folder.

Answer 1

Short answer: you don't. :(

Quick Access doesn't display any subfolders in the Navigatgion Pane because it has no subfolders, it's merely a collection of shortcuts. Tricks of the shell available only to Quick Access muddy this fact somewhat by displaying the Properties dialog of target. The Recent Files section is a filtered view of your shell:Recent folder, which is nothing but a collection of shortcuts. The Recent Folders section, on the other hand, is a virtual folder view of the items seen in the Explorer jump list, which is maintained by the cryptically-named files found under:

• shell:Recent\AutomaticDestinations

But regardless of their source, they behave like shortcuts in that they "jump" to their target's location.

"But what about the folders under This PC ..."

While Quick Access and This PC are both virtual folders, the folders under This PC aren't merely shortcuts, they are each virtaul folders themselves, but virtual folders whose contents mirror the file-system location of the correspoinding usser folder. Each has its target specified and is added to the This PC folder by various entries in the registry.

You could create a sort of custom Quick Access by creating a folder of Folder Shortcuts which behave very much like the folders under This PC. I recently composed an answer detailing how to create these.