FIX: Folder View Settings Not Saving on Windows 7
In Windows 7, you have complete control over how the files in the folders on your computer are displayed. By clicking on the arrow next to the Change your view button located in the right corner of the toolbar at the very top of Windows 7’s File Explorer. Windows 7 users have a wide variety of different file viewing options to choose from – from the Tiles view and the Details view to the List view and the Medium Icons view. Once you use the Change your view button to change how the files in the folder are displayed – or even do so by right-clicking on an empty space in the corner, click on Properties in the context menu, navigating to the Customize tab and using the Optimize this folder for option, the files will always be displayed the way you have configured them to be displayed, until or unless you change the file viewing settings.
However, sometimes things can go wrong, causing Windows 7 to completely forget or not save how you configured the files in a specific folder to be displayed. This leads to the files in one or more of the folders on your computer being displayed in a different way than the one you configured them to be displayed in.
More often than not, though, this issue is caused when Windows 7, for some reason, decides to overwrite the file viewing settings of a folder – henceforth known as the Child Folder – with the file viewing settings of the folder directly above it – henceforth referred to as the Parent Folder. This is an especially common cause in cases where the path to the affected folder is something like:
X:\Parent Folder\Child Folder
Note: In the path above, X is the drive letter associated with the drive partition that the Parent Folder and Child Folder are located on.
For some reason, Windows 7 sometimes thinks that the file viewing settings of a folder supersede all of the file viewing settings of its subfolders, causing the file viewing settings of the Child Folder to be disregarded and the file viewing settings of the Parent Folder being used instead. Thankfully, though, this issue is pretty easily fixable. If you want to resolve this problem, you need to:
Press Windows Logo key + E to launch Windows 7’s File Explorer.
In the File Explorer, navigate to X: (X being the drive letter associated with the drive partition that the Parent Folder and Child Folder are located on.
Locate and right-click on Parent Folder, click on Rename in the context menu and rename the folder to something other than Parent Folder. For example, renaming it to Parent Folder-old will be just fine.
Right-click on an empty space, hover over New in the context menu and click on Folder. Name the new folder Parent Folder.
Once this step has been completed, you’ll be in X:\ with Parent Folder-old and Parent Folder.
Double click on Parent Folder-old to go into it, and click on Ctrl + A to select everything inside it, including the Child Folder.
Press Ctrl + X to Cut everything selected.
Navigate to X:\Parent Folder and press Ctrl + V, moving everything from Parent Folder-old to Parent Folder.
Navigate to X:\, right click on Parent Folder-old, click on Delete in the context menu and click on Yes in the resulting popup.
Navigate to X:\Parent Folder\Child Folder and configure the file viewing settings as you like, and they should now be applied as they are supposed to be.
