The VideoLAN Forums

I like to just drag'n'drop file shortcuts into VLC - not shortcuts to whole folders, but instead just to one video file. That always worked fine for me; but since I updated to 2.0.5 yesterday, it won't anymore - it tries to play the shortcut file and fails, instead of trying to play the file the shortcut links to. Before, I had no problem with this, and was doing it all the time - was the feature removed? Did I mess up some setting or something? Can I restore that behavior to the current version of the player?

EDIT: Similar to this, when I try to open a shortcut file through the "Open file..." menu option, the whole player just crashes. That shouldn't happen either, right?

Reset the preferences.
If it doesn't help then I'm afraid something went wrong on your system.

It's funny because playing shortcuts isn't supported by any version prior to 2.1.0, at least on my system (XP SP3 x32).
I can't use 2.1.0+ so I would like to have this function with 2.0.8.
As implied by this thread it should work already with 2.0.5? But how? I just doesn't work for me.
I have tested clean installs of the versions from 2.0.0 to 2.0.8 everytime with old settings deleted.
Is there a trick or a special setting in windows necessary for it to work?