Oh, I missed your later update where the search indexing suddenly appears to be working. So all good there, then!

MS-Win does NOT have symlinks. It has "aliases", which only work in the GUI. symlinks are a lower level filesystem thing, not a special case just for the desktop.

They're actually pretty simple, too: just a string substitution.

A symlink is a directory entry, whose contents are a string. When the symlink's name is used, the filesystem substitutes that stored string in place of it.

That's it. Very very simple, and amazingly powerful.

Cheers