We've occasionally come across situations where we want to pack up our Flash projects as single executable files - not installers! - that can be run on the desktop without needing to be installed. This is like just creating and running a Flash projector.exe - however, our projects generally consist of more than one file, and packing them up as a single projector is impossible. We've also hit this when using the Flash wrapper SWHX, which depends on a lot of external files.

So, while evaluating AIR as a potential wrapper for our latest project, our only major issue is that AIR doesn't give you the option of creating more than one icon in the Windows Start Menu. Our products tend to come with associated config applications or support documents, and historically we've always put links to them in the Start Menu.

So I started to look into how to create Windows shortcuts using AIR.

This should have been easy, but thanks to Microsoft's proprietary binary file format, it really wasn't.