I just noticed that I can open folders from the recycle bin without restoring them. I have the qttabbar extension that adds tabs to the standard windows explorer and I accidentally middle-clicked a folder.
It not only opened fine in a tab, but its contents behaved as if not deleted: proper open action and a full right-click menu.
That means all that's keeping users from opening files inside of recycle bin is that there's no menu action/open handler or whatever.
To be fair, notepad2 did choke on opening a file from a subfolder in recycle bin (bad path), although notepad++ handled the same file just fine. Thus this feature might not be for the faint of heart, but it would be extremely useful when crawling through heaps of garbage :)
Has anyone heard of such a hack/feature?
C:\$Recycle.Bin
with the "show hidden files" option checked and the "hide protected system files" unchecked, you will see a "Recycle bin" folder in there with the recycle bin item. You can open that folder and then copy-paste the title bar into an Open dialog of a program, then open the file from the program. Also, theoretically, you can open the files in there with cmd, but they all have coded names such as$R1PM1PT.JPG
which isn't visible in Windows Explorer that you need to know to open the file using cmd.