Eclipse: How to Create "Linked Resource" not in .projects Directory? - eclipse

Question

I am using the Eclipse RCP for Developers to create a version of the Workbench that's specialized to the development we do at work. Most of this has already been done, but I am fine-tuning now.
To initialize a project, users have to create a "preferences" file, which contains various settings. These settings include the "paths" for the code/files they want the project to load. Until now, users have had to nest all relevant code/files in the directory that contains the preferences file, like so:
./folder/file.prefs
./folder/nestedFolder/
./folder/nestedFolder2
(And so on.)
However, I'd like for users to be able to provide relative paths for folders/files not in the home directory, like so:
../../randomFolder/
The only problem I've seen (this works fine for integrating the code/file itself) is getting it to "show up" in the package explorer tool. To do this, you have to create a linked resource (as I already wrote code to do, for nested directories).
However, when I try to link to non-nested folders, I get this error:
ResourceException: Could not created linked resource {path}. Parent resource not accessible.
My code looks like this:
for (String path: FolderPaths) {
IFolder folder = project.getFolder(path)
if (!folder.exists()) {
folder.createLink(pathBase.append(path), IResource.FOLDER, nullProgressMonitor)
}
}
"pathBase" is an "IPath" pointing to the home directory's full-path.
Note that even if the FolderPath "path" is relative to the original prefs file:
../test/folder
Creating an IFolder with the "project.getFolder(path)" method changes it to:
/test/folder
Presumably, this is because the "workspace" is now attempting to create a project folder in the local directory, then link that folder to the path I pass in; this has always worked in the past, but now I get the error above.