Is there any way to allow the user to browse through the directories on his/her machine and select a folder, rather than a file?
Nope for security reasons it never will either. If you need this functionality the only posibility is the flash.filesystem package with Adobe AIR or other 3rd party flash wrappers.
I forgot to mention that I am building the applicaiton in AIR - how convenient! And thank you, it worked beautifully. 8^)