Working with Vista, I've noticed that it tries to be a tad too helpful sometimes. I've already posted about it's proclivity for attempting to AutoTune my network card and in the process, detuning it.

There's a reason Bob failed, and a reason those annoying "Office assistants" got dumped first thing after installing Office. I suppose I should be thankful there's no 3D animated wizard bouncing out of the sidebar from time to time to "wave it's wand" on a window of mine to move it to the monitor that would be "more appropriate", or whatever.

One annoyance I've run into is that Vista tends to just "decide" that I want a particular folder to show in grouped view, or in thumbnail view, even though I've gone through the process of turning all that crap off and setting ALL FOLDERS to view in Details mode.

Grrr.

Well, I was just browsing for something completely unrelated and happened upon this posting by MVP Keith Miller about turning off the autodetect view in Explorer.

In it, he describes a reg hack that'll do just that, turn that feature off.

Here's the script (you'll need to save it to a REG file and Right click and select MERGE)

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags\All Folders\Shell]
"FolderType"="NotSpecified"

Before you run it though. Load up RegEdit and check out that Bags key:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags

If your system is anything like mine, there will be literally HUNDREDS of entries in there.

Make sure you turn off "Remember Each folders settings", and then Delete the whole Bags key to remove all those "memorized" folder settings you didn't want to memorize in the first place. No wonder the damn registry balloons faster than Steve Fossett in a hurricane.