I’ve been using Vista on my desktop for sometime now.  One major gripe I have had is with Windows Explorer.  Whenever I would double-click a folder in Explorer, a new window would pop up, exploring that folder.  If I double-clicked a subfolder within that folder, a third Explorer window popped up.

For the longest time, I only knew of two ways around the endless new Explorer windows:

#1 - Right-click on the folder and click “Explore” instead of double-clicking.

#2 - Turn off the navigation pane (the folders view on the left side of Explorer).

Neither of these “fixes” were appealing.  No way did I want to get rid of my folders pane.  Additionally, right-clicking on every folder I want to open just becomes very, very cumbersome.

The obvious solution was to go to Tools -> Folder Options, and select “Open each folder in the same window.”  Since that didn’t seem to fix anything, I would assume that only applies when the navigation (folder) pane is hidden.

After a lot of searching and a few unsuccessful registry tweaks, I stumbled across this post, claiming a possible solution.

I followed cuneyt’s instructions from the post, closed regedit, closed on Explorer windows, and reopened Windows Explorer.  I double-clicked on a folder, and… no new window!  It worked!

I’m pretty thrilled to have finally found a solution to this surprisingly irritating problem.  It doesn’t really seem like a big deal until you realize how much it can affect your workflow when browsing through a bunch of different folders.

I hope this is able to help somebody else out there!