Hi, I am a photographer and as such find myself consistently trawling through many many folders. On a photo shoot I use a laptop to view photographic results instantly.My problem is that not so long ago I found a reg tweak that automatically placed an explorer bar on the left side of every folder opened. I thought this could be useful. Having said this, I find I use windows explorer rarely and prefer to navigate by use of shortcuts directly to my most used folders and once there, navigate to the desired folder/folders. This explorer bar on the left side of every folder opened, "can" be closed manually by all the usual methods (using the small x at the top right of the bar, using view/explorer bar/ untick folders) Then using tools/ folder options/ view/ apply to all folders, one would think the bar would go away system wide, but no. In the registry I have tried changing the remember folders view settings from the default 400 up to 8000 but still this bar persists. Every time I open a folder the first two inches on the left side of the folder is always taken up with this explorer bar and every time I finally reach my desired folder, to regain space, I am forced to manually close this bar (just for clarity and even though I feel stupid saying it, this is a windows explorer bar and not anything related to IE - please see attached folderXP.jpg).
Space to view the thumbnails, as I discovered too late, is my main priority, not easy folder navigation. I am fairly certain it was a 0 or 1 switch in a particular reg key that caused this always recurring explorer bar - but I can't for the life of me remember which one.
Many thanks in advance to anyone who can help.
Laptop OS: Xp home sp2
Attached: folderXP.jpg