The Windows UI team did a lot of great work around this time. I remember reading a post on the Windows Shell blog where they explained an ingenious they made to explorer. They added some margin on the left hand side of the detailed listview. Try it out and select a file, there is a blank space of about 15 pixels to the left of the row. This is so that you always have space to start a rubberband selection, even if the window is full with files. (You may also start it over the greyed out columns, but if you start on the name column, you start dragging the file instead.)

I wonder if anybody archived the blog post somewhere? I cannot find it in archive.org unfortunately.

I've never seen this feature implemented anywhere else (except in an unpublished Gtk app of mine where it was a pain to implement :-)).