Commenter Anonymous asked why navigating to a drive with no media displays a dialog instead of showing the error message in the view.

This is an unfortunate consequence of Explorer’s browser/view model. The shell browser binds to the IShellFolder and asks for the view by calling IShellFolder::CreateViewWindow. The view window calls IShellFolder::EnumObjects to figure out what to show in the view—and here is where the error dialog appears asking you to insert a disc into the drive.

The problem is that IShellFolder::EnumObjects has to return an enumerator or an error code. There is no return value that says “Um, yeah, could you display this text instead?” In a narrow sense, there’s no way to return it since there is no way to return a string from IShellFolder::EnumObjects, but it’s also not possible in a broader sense, since there is no rule that says only shell views can call IShellFolder::EnumObjects. Anybody can bind to a shell folder and enumerate its contents. And most of them don’t have any place to display a text message instead of the enumerated objects. For example, the folder tree uses IShellFolder::EnumObjects to fill in children of a node. If you expand a node for an empty floppy drive, where is the “Sorry” message supposed to appear?

Now, you might say, “Well, make a special case for Explorer,” and maybe that’s the right thing to do, but designing in a special case to a general interface just for one program tends to create resentment for others: “How come Explorer can do this but my program can’t?”