I found this gem in Dan Maharry’s RSS feed as part of his del.icio.us bookmarks. It’s a few registry edits to stop Windows Explorer auto-selecting a different folder view based on its content, e.g. normally if a folder happens to have a GIF or JPEG in it, Explorer will “helpfully” switch to thumbnail view.

Keith Miller posted a registry tweaks in the TechNet forums which I’ve rolled up here (mostly for for my own convenience) into a single batch file which also restarts Explorer:

setlocal

set BASE_KEY=HKCUSoftwareClassesLocal SettingsSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsShell

:: Delete cached folder views
reg delete "%BASE_KEY%Bags" /f
reg delete "%BASE_KEY%BagMRU" /f 

:: Set default folder template
reg add "%BASE_KEY%BagsAllFoldersShell" /v FolderType /d NotSpecified

:: Restart Explorer
taskkill /f /im explorer.exe
start explorer.exe

If you don’t know what a batch file is or how to use it then you shouldn’t be using this :-p. Likewise, it works for me but your mileage may vary…