I have a serious love hate relationship with Windows Explorer in Vista. On the one hand there are lots of cool little improvements that make life much easier starting with the breadcrumb address bar that lets me easily jump anywhere in the current hierarchy, to the way file copies rename files, the way rename highlights only the files base stem etc. etc. There are a lot of tiny little thoughtful things in Explorer that are quite nice and you don't really realize how much they improve usability until you go back to XP or Win2003 and find them missing. I feel silly everytime I click on the address bar when I'm doing admin on my Win2003 server with Terminal Services.

But there are many maddening things as well. Scott Hanselman beat me to posting about my #1 beef which is Windows constantly screwing around with my folder configurations. From showing arbitrary folder views when I get 'Massive Icon mode' on one folder, and the order list of small icons on the next folder down the tree and some sort of media view that has zero useful information beyond the file name in the next. All I want is the damn report view, damn it!

Nothing like getting a useless Explorer view of your code folders. I really don't need these blind sighted icons to view my code files:

What I want to know is how in the world does the folder view get like this? I don't change my folder views hardly ever - the only place I ever do anything like this is on my photo folders which live on a completely different drive. So how come these base views change. This has always been a problem with XP as well, but this seemingly random switching is really a pain in the ass.

There are a few suggestions on to get more sanity into Explorer in the comments on Scott's post but none of them seem to work reliably for me. <shrug> This is by far the most annoying Vista 'feature'.

Related is the 'Media View' which even if you do manage to keep your folders in the right View (ie. Details View) you still get some deranged view that doesn't tell you what you need to know. Apparently this view triggers if there's any image or media item in the folder and it looks like this:

No freaking date/time and several tags that are complete waste. Even in image/media folders this isn't useful to me. While you can add the date/time into this view (and hide the others) these settings don't seem to take. This is actually controlled by a dialog for the folder you can get to by clicking in the empty space of the folder then properties:

Here you can get the proper All Items view back and also apply to subfolders. Unforutnately this doesn't work off the root directory so you have to limit yourself to any base folders (Documents most likely). Once set it seems to hold for a while but then goes south again after a while.

Then there's the madness that are the funky confirmation dialogs that Vista uses for confirming overwrites and failures. The good news is that in most cases Vista lets you Skip things if there's a problem unlike prior versions of Windows where a problem usually meant you had to stop half way through some task and pick up the pieces on your own. But the new dialogs have a number of options on them and they are laid out in a horribly user unfriendly way in my opinion. They are ugly and unintuitive to use. If you've been using Vista I bet a large sum of money you've clicked on the wrong button by accident more than once!

A lot of choices on that dialog in multiple places. Worse though is the default option (enter) which cancels. Hmmm... ok. Seems like an odd UI choice. ESC is meant for cancel. The default action should be to overwrite. Then there's the 'Do this for all conflict' - this thing should be prechecked. In most copy situations you'll want to overwrite files and rare would be the occasion where you would want to be prompted for each individual file. This just seems like really odd defaults. I suspect this is more of the 'play it safe' bullshit.

Then there's this problem that I run into constantly. I try to delete a directory and when I start deleting I get this error:

Now I'm running as Admin and the folder is not any sort of special folder but Vista will not let me delete it from the top level directory. I can then however go into the folder and delete the content in the child directory and that all works fine. There's no permissions issue, there's no locked files, but the dialog is there nonetheless giving incorrect information. WTF?

And of course everybody's favorite: Windows Explorer has stopped responding. I'd love to put a screen shot of it in here, but unfortunately I can't since Explorer isn't running and I can't switch tasks <s>...

Love hate, love hate - it's definitely hate tonight.