Usability Beef

Dear Microsoft Windows 2000 Usability Team,

Windows 2000 lets you create shortcuts. This is handy: instead of clicking through a ten-deep folder structure to find an item, you create a shortcut to it (right-click, "Create Shortcut"), place it on your desktop and hey presto, you have direct access to the item. Nifty. Not original (think Unix' symbolic links), but still nifty.
I just have one usability issue with this piece of functionality. What is the one place where you don't want this shortcut to go? Answer: in the folder where the actual item is (the one that the shortcut points to). That, after all, would defeat the whole purpose of the shortcut.
And what is the only place where the shortcut can be created? That's right, in the folder where the actual item is. This means that you always have to manually cut-and-paste the item to somewhere else (most likely the desktop).
This is silly.
Why not pop up a dialog that says "Where do you want this shortcut to go?" with the choices "On the desktop" or "Somewhere else" + browse button. In fact, if you are in a folder that you don't have write access to, a helpful popup appears saying "Windows cannot create a shortcut here. Do you want the shortcut to be placed on the desktop instead?" So you are dimly aware that the desktop is where people want to put their shortcuts 99.99999% of the time.
Just fix this in the next Service Pack, please.