Windows Explorer Folder View settings

Thank you for your quick reply. I actually did the download first and rebooted and had the same lack of a result. However, I just went to How to Choose a Folder Type Template :
and was successful. Thank you. For some reason the inability to have the folders display properly was a source of stress for me.

LOL Chunnel,

I know how you feel. I'm not happy until I get it the way I want it to.

Glad to hear you got it set the way you want it. Thank you for the feedback.

Shawn

Thanks for a great resource Shawn. This folder layout problem is maddening, but I suppose I am going to run across more than a few of those before I get Vista trained (or revert to XP).

Most folder layouts, I could adjust, just learn to live with it. But I have one, that I have used in XP for years, sort of a subsittute desktop, with a shortcut to it on the Quicklaunch. It is one of my main entry points to everything else. About 40 medium sized icons, arranged in clumps, according to function (in XP, I even had a background image). At first XP would lose the layout there, but I found a patch similar to yours that increased the cache limit, and since then, it has worked for me for years.

I used your REG download to run the changes, then went back and checked the registry change results against your alternate procedure. Looks like it worked fine. And all was well for about 3 days. Then, something happened to trip it back to details view. (Back to regedit)

What we all need is a way to get a folder layout set "correctly" than lock it from future changes. I was hopeful that your tip on setting folder attributes to "read-only" would do it, but apparently, you dont need write-access to the folder to change its layout.

Vista has a lot of nice new features that dont get mentioned much, like the stability and performance monitoring, but they seem largely of interest for serious geeks. If it were not for sites like yours, the migration would be much more frustrating. Thanks again.

Hi Periboob,

Welcome to the forum.

I wish I knew exactly what was causing Vista to forget the folder view settings, but I only know how to reset it so Vista will remember again. Strange thing is that I very rarely have Vista forget mine. Perhaps this is why I cannot find the cause.

I would keep the download or link handy so you could easily reset it when needed.

Thank you,
Shawn

... Finally found a way to fix this annoying problem!!! Thanks again & again Shawn

Your welcome niGht kiD.

Just a crumb of info for your investigations Brink. My folder for which I really want to keep a custom layout is still forgetting. But here is the thing--When I access this folder from my quick launch bar icon, it is details view. Same thing from the Explorer "Favorite Links"--click the "favorite link" for it, I get details view. But when in Explorer, I climb down the folder tree in the "Folders" pane, to click the same folder, I get my customized view, medium sized icons, unsorted, not aligned to grid,...

So, the "memory" of a folder's layout, is, as near as I can tell, an invalid concept. At least, there are "a set of memories" of folder layout. So that the layout of a folder is dependent on whether or not a shortcut (or perhaps which shortcut) was clicked to get to that folder. !?!

I have no clue whats going on--dont know how it is being done, nor why anyone would want to do something like this.

Hi Periboob,

Thank you for the information.

I was able to reproduce this with the user folder Documents.

From the Start menu and Favorites; I had the Documents older set to Medium icons. It was not so from the C:\Users\(username)\Documents location like yours. It was still set to Details.

When I changed the view settings at C:\Users\(username)\Documents to Medium icons and closed it, all of them opened as Medium as expected.


My guess is that this has something to do with the NTFS symbolic links with the hidden My Documents as the junction point for the Documents folder.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link

It causes them to have a separate view memory instead of one like a normal shortcut to a folder.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

That sounds like a good explanation. I am just getting my feet wet in the Junction/Sym-Link swamp. Now that you mention it, I think I remember that I changed a folder-icon somewhere (maybe FavoriteLinks?) and it did not change everywhere I expected it to.

I think it was a mistake for MS to release Junctions on the unspecting public without a little training. It is one thing to have the new power-tools hidden in obscure command-line utilities, but Junctions and the effects seem to be sprinkled around the GUI where the average user can slice their fingers off.

I know folks who are just getting comfortable with Shortcuts, this may cause some severe stress problems.

Shawn,

Thank you so much for discovering how to reset the folder views, so that what I specify, Vista actually remembers. Also, thank you for doing such a thorough job on showing us how to do it.

Just a few hours ago, I followed your directions, and so far, Explorer/Documents has been holding steady! Very nice.

There is one correction I would like to add to your directions under "Increase Folder View Cache Memory". At least for my Vista registry, I needed to follow a slightly different path than you show. My path was: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell.

I was able to locate the BagMRU Size by doing a Find search.

Cheers, Andy