WPA just looked at the debug information for all of the EXEs and PE files and downloaded symbol files from Microsoft’s symbol servers
I've always found it funny that MS would publicly distribute these, since they get you probably 90% of the way to actual source code from the perspective of understanding how Windows works.
...so I pulled out the shell32.pdb from some version of XP (not sure which one, might be SP1 or SP2) and it has no BatchPositionChangesHelper, CCollectionSink, CListViewHost, nor IconLayoutEngine. It does have CDesktopBrowser and SHDesktopMessageLoop. Also, "windows.storage.dll" definitely isn't present in XP, given that it's a WinRT thing.
In other words, I'm inclined to believe this bug was not there originally, but was introduced during one of their horrid shell rewrites that happened after XP --- someone who has easy access to the Vista or newer symbols can see when those functions were introduced.
I also bet it was partially due to the insane amounts of abstraction that seems to be the norm in code today, where algorithms can become accidentally quadratic or worse without being noticed ("it's just a loop so it must be linear"... forgetting that in that loop's body, there's another loop somewhere down in the long chain of function calls.)
...and speaking of source code, someone who isn't bothered by the legal aspects could probably get to the bottom of this bug: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24586708