I got a bit envious of the nice breadcrumb style location bar while messing with Snowbird recently. So, I went a-Googling.

With some light searching, I turned up two options: QT Address Bar and Minimalist Explorer Breadcrumbs. Both are shell extensions to Explorer, taking the form of toolbars.

I downloaded both, but have not installed QT Address Bar because of reported issues and the stellar performance of Minimalist. Also, QT looks like Vista, but Minimalist blends in nicely enough with your visual style.

Screenshots of Minimalist (traditional Address Bar disabled):

Note: StExBar (StEx in screencap) is a different shell extension I have; it's not related.

And, a nice feature, just like Vista, is that when you click on some empty space in the bar, it switches to an address bar and highlights the current path.

 

Having been shown by Elliot how the Vista breadcrumbs work, I think this shell extension has done a good job of bringing a (hopefully) helpful Vista feature to XP (and supposedly to 98/ME/2k/2003, too, though they haven't tested on those).

One last note: Explorer Breadcrumbs is completely free and functional, but they ask you to register it ($7.95) if you find it useful. Time will tell for me.

I actually had gotten the security tab via a shell extension a while ago, but it seemed to be the source of instability problems, so out it went. There are other ways to do it, but MS lets you have it for free with the Windows NT SP4 Security Configuration Manager. I haven't tried it out yet, but it sounds pretty sweet. Not that I really need it, but hey, it's power for nothing.

Here's the download page, here's the FTP folder it's in, and here is a direct link. If you check out the FTP folder, the file you want is SCESP4I.EXE.

[found via Grand Stream Dreams]

Update, December 19, 2009: Having just had to install this due to a couple of folders on my external hard drive getting locked by my previous XP install, I can now recommend a specific install procedure. Run SCESP4I.EXE, select a folder in which to extract the files. Go to the folder, right-click setup.inf, click Install, and wait for the magic to happen. It will inform you, if I remember correctly, that you will need to restart your computer for the changes to take effect. That, fortunately, is not true. You can test this by right-clicking a file, going to Properties, and going to the Security tab. There it will be in all of its XP Pro glory. Enjoy.