On 18 Aug 2005 at 5:04, Richard Yates wrote:

> Wow! How long has that been there? . . .

It's always been there. The - on the keypad collapses a tree.

I don't use these much in Explorer, but I do use them a lot in the 
Registry Editor (but most people don't have much call to use 
RegEdit).

> . . . Could be very useful
> although it doesn't do anything in Open and Save dbs. . . .

Well, you do know that you can change view from your default view 
(which is likely to be filenames only) to the Details view, using the 
icons up in the upper right of the dialog (depending on whether or 
not the application programmer decided to include them). 

Also, for navigating the "Look In" dropdown, remember that F4 is the 
keyboard shortcut for dropping a dropdown list, and in the standard 
Windows File Open dialog, as long as the focus is not in another 
dropdown (such as the Files of Type dropdown), F4 is mapped to drop 
the Look In list. You can then navigate the Look In hierarchy with 
the keyboard, using ENTER to select a folder, then TAB to the list of 
files.

I know that many people find this whole UI confusing, and I agree. 
But it is a significant improvement over the Win16 file open dialog.

I'd like to see a redesign of the File dialog APIs to account for the 
fact that we now have larger screen resolutions. When the File dialog 
APIs we are now accustomed to were written, 640x480 was all you could 
count on, and thus the dialogs are sized to reflect that. This makes 
them way too small at modern resolutions. Somewhere along the line, 
they added the resizability triangle (lower right corner) as a 
standard feature, but this only partly solves the problem.

> . . . Also, for some
> reason, when I expand a directory this way I also have a 'Sign in with
> Microsoft Passport Network box popup (???)

I've never understood why so many people installed MSN Explorer. 
Seems to me that Microsoft was purposefully using deceptive practices 
by naming so many things with the "Explorer" moniker in order to 
confuse people into thinking that MSN Explorer was an upgrade to 
Internet Explorer (or Windows Explorer) instead the client for an 
online service.

It's possible that's not the reason you're getting that popup, but 
it's the most common one I've run into. If you're not an MSN user, I 
see no reason to have MSN components installed, including MSN 
Messenger, which is actually rather tricky to get rid of (depending 
on the version involved).

I wish there were something out there that would help a Windows user 
manage Explorer Shell add-ins. I see dozens of them listed in my 
Windows Registry, most of which I have no use for whatsoever, and I'd 
like to have some way to figure out what they are doing and who 
installed them. 

This is also one of chief vectors for spyware, installing as an 
Explorer Shell add-in, and is why many of them are so hard to get rid 
of. I just tried Googling to see if there are any tools for managing 
Shell extensions, but it's impossible to define a search that the 
doesn't just return thousands of Shell extensions. *sigh*

-- 
David W. Fenton                        http://www.bway.net/~dfenton
David Fenton Associates                http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc

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