Forgotten Windows Feature: Document Scraps

Up to Windows XP, there was an obscure little feature of the shell called "scraps." It is a system which, essentially, allows you to take an OLE object that supports dragging-and-dropping (and serialization) and place it in the file system as a file. These files, scraps, are even given special treatment kind of like shortcuts - extensions never seem to be shown for them (though they do have extension SHS).

They are usually generated from Microsoft Office products, by dragging selected text or objects out of the Office window and onto the desktop. They can then be dragged in later to a different document, or double-clicked like normal files to launch the owning application and paste the contents into the new window.

You can read the Microsoft KB article for the official information.