Just written up another longstanding problem I’ve had – failure of Explorer to maintain the sort preferences of a folder, even though its told to do this (kept setting sort by Name in my case when it should be by Modified):
When Tools -> Folder Options -> View tab -> Advanced settings: Remember each folder’s view settings is enabled, Explorer saves folder display options (the View setting, sort option etc) in ‘ShellBag’ entries in the registry, see ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ShellNoRoam\Bags’ and ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags’. There is a maximum number of folders that can have these settings saved for, and this is located at ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ShellNoRoam\BagMRU Size’ – this defaults to 5,000 in Windows XP SP2 (remember to edit it as a Decimal value).
NirSoft has a useful tool that allows you to see all of the ShellBags currently defined, including their actual path and the ability to hop directly to the associated registry values, called ShellBagsView. Find the folder you are interested in and hop to the registry – the sort method defined for the folder is maintained in the ‘Sort’ key, which can take the following values:
0: Sort by name
1: Sort by size
2: Sort by type
3: Sort by modified
Hopefully this will get Explorer to behave.
