It's not stated here but under Vista (and perhaps also in earlier versions) SHCreateShellFolderView will return E_NOINTERFACE if the folder passed in the SFV_CREATE doesn't implement IShellFolder2. This blog post mentions this: http://shellrevealed.com/blogs/shellblog/archive/2007/03/15/Shell-Namespace-Extension_3A00_-Creating-and-Using-the-System-Folder-View-Object.aspx