I combined jimbojones' original script with the ideas from davidrw, and then added a command-line option so you could specify a path. So for example you can set up desktop shortcuts to open an explorer window pointing to things like "C:\Apache\conf".

I had to change the -d test in the sort specification from
   -d $b <=> -d $a
to
   (-d $b ? 1 : 0) <=> (-d $a ? 1 : 0)
because I was getting errors messages about invalid numeric comparison...

use warnings;
use strict;

use Cwd;
use File::Spec ();
use IO::Dir;

my $path = shift || cwd();
$path = File::Spec->canonpath($path);

if (-d $path) {
    chdir $path
        or die "Can't chdir to \"$path\"\n";
    my $dir_handle = IO::Dir->new($path)
        or die "Can't open \"$path\"\n";
    my @items = sort { (-d $b ? 1 : 0) <=> (-d $a ? 1 : 0) || $a cmp $
+b }
                        grep { ! /^[.][.]?$/ } $dir_handle->read;
    undef $dir_handle;
    $path = File::Spec->catfile($path, $items[0] || '.');
}
elsif (! -f $path) {
    die "Can't find \"$path\"\n";
}

exec 'explorer.exe /e,/select,' . $path;   # launch Explorer

exit;
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Larry