Open dialogue "Arrange Icons" - changing the default order i

[joanne342]

Hello

I'm new to this board. I've had Windows 98 for about ten years or something. I've used 2K, XP and Vista extensively and still prefer 98 to all of them.

Anyway, this has happened to me twice but 98 crashed on me because I was trying to put a three minute track through Zero-X BeatCreator. After that, every open dialogue box in every program defaulted to arranging the icons by date. I can right click and arrange alphabetically but the default is by date. At first it annoyed me but then I got to prefer it.

I had to reinstall windows and the open dialogue default went back to alphabetical but then a bad BeatCreator crash made the same thing happen again.

I've reinstalled windows several times since, over the years, but the open dialogue default thing has never happened again so is there any way to change the default? I've asked on other forums but they always tell me things like how to arrange icons in a folder and how to change the default of that and it doesn't answer the question.

Somebody asked the same question here:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/315192.html

and probably put it clearer than me and he never got an answer that worked either. I too followed those very clear instructions and it didn't work.

So many thanks for an help with this!

Thanks

Joanne

[joanne342]

The full title was supposed to say

"Open dialogue "Arrange Icons" - changing the default order in 98SE"

It got curtailed

[Drugwash]

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer]
"ShellState"=hex:1c,00,00,00,25,0f,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,\
  01,00,00,00,0a,00,00,00

Copy/Paste the above code into a shTDview.reg file and execute it - should default all folders to sorting by Time, descending.

Alternatively:

1. open Explorer

2. click the C drive in the left pane

3. click View > Details in the menu

4. click the desired column header in the right pane (make sure the sort order is ascending or descending as preferred)

5. press and hold CTRL while clicking the [x] to close the Explorer window

6. a reboot may be required

I'm not sure if the reg solution is complete so you'd be better off taking the second approach to it.

[joanne342]

Thanks so much!

I can't believe it's working. The second approach didn't work so I tried the first approach which didn't work either so i opened regedit and navigated to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Microsoft > Windows > CurrentVersion > Explorer and found that, weirdly, there was no value called ShellState there at all, so I created it and typed in that hex string you said and it's working!

[Drugwash]

Glad you got it working!

The reg file was probably missing the trailing linefeed, since this board is automatically stripping whitespace. So after you copy/paste the text in the code box, just tap ENTER at the end of the text to add a new line; then it should work (you may wanna keep it as reference, just in case).