I have looked on symlink handling in ls-lisp.el, and that made me wonder
what the stub `ls-lisp-parse-symlink' was all about. Since the comment
mentions the module w32-symlinks.el from
http://centaur.maths.qmw.ac.uk/Emacs/ (not part of Emacs), I looked into
that as well.
w32-symlinks.el uses filename magic to handle symlinks on w32, but there
is a number of bugs and shortcomings. I have fixed those, and as a
consequence w32-symlinks.el becomes a stand-alone module and
`ls-lisp-parse-symlink' is no longer needed. Therefore I suggest the
attached patch to ls-lisp.el. The patch also makes `ls-lisp-dirs-first'
recognize symlinks to directories.

If there are no objections, I will commit in a few days.

I have e-mailed my patched version of w32-symlinks.el to Francis J.
Wright some time ago asking him to put it on his web page, but that has
not happened (yet). If any of you want it, I can e-mail it to you. With
my patches w32-symlinks.el seems pretty mature ;-) so maybe it should
become part of Emacs (not that I really care personally). But I don't
know about possible legal implications.