Hi there,
I think those little arrows came in with Windows 95 wasnt it?
Anyway, i used TweekUI to get rid of them at one time, but these
days they dont bother me anymore, and besides, i keep things on
the desktop that are both 'real' and 'links' so it does help to show
the difference right away.
In the past, the arrows came about to show the user what was a link
and what was 'real' because the underlying Windows object handler
could not distinguish between links and real objects, so sometimes
the namespace logic would think you were copying a real object instead
of a link and so would copy the .lnk file instead of the actual object!
This was ridiculous as a copy to backup would copy a dang link
file which after the copy onto say a removable disk, would point
to something on another computer! A lot of good that was.
I guess the MS quick fix was to add the arrows so the user would
know, but then in a later fix they added logic to tell the difference
between real objects and links so that an attempt to copy via a
'link' icon would actually copy the object pointed to by that link.
In any case, i still like to be able to tell the difference between my
real objects and link objects so i keep the arrows now.