[gui-talk] Maintaining View settings in Win Xp Windows Explorer

[Joel Deutsch]

Hi listers,

I'm lucky to have managed to get my Acer laptop running under familiar Win 
XP Home rather than the Windows 7 it came with, thanks to my I T 
professional pal who set it up for me, which included having to seek out all 
sorts of drivers that were freely available and easy to find until Microsoft 
began shipping Windows 7, at which point they forced a lot of computer 
companies to stop offering drivers for Win XP. Or so says my friend..

Fine. So that's one thing I didn't have to learn afresh. As everyone knows, 
the keyboard alone is a tough enough challenge for this dude.

But I have to relearn something I used to know how to set on my XP desktop, 
but have forgotten how to do long ago. Making View settings stick in Windows 
Explorer. I discovered that some files in some folders were invisible to me 
and, checking their properties, I learned that it wasn't because somehow 
they'd been checked to be invisible or something. it turned out that the 
option "Icons was checked in the View menu, and this had made some files 
disappear. I don't know why that is.

anyway, I arrowed down to Details and pressed Enter to check it, instead, 
and the files reappeared, and navigation was normal. But just leaving 
Windows Explorer to do something in another application and coming back to 
look for another file, I found that my change had undone itself and half the 
files in certain folders had again disappeared, or I didn't know how to look 
for them. Like maybe you're supposed to use the left and right arrows 
instead of going up and down, as if the files were icons on your Desktop? I 
didn't think of that. I just arrowed up and down, because that's what was 
habit for me.

So I went into the View menu and, sure enough, it had reset itself to show 
Icons checked again. I arrowed to Details, hit Enter, and things went back 
to normal, by my lights.

But how do you get changes to the View menu to stick? I just plain forgot.

thanks in advance to anyone who knows what I'm talking about and can 
reeducate me on this.

Joel