How do I get Finder windows to hold their settings?

I've been considering doing similar.

ran nude and it just crashed.

ran IceClean and it just hung.

eventualy unmounted Bootcamp and my Time Machine drives so it would ignore them, and ran this in terminal.

sudo find / -name ".DS_Store" -depth -exec rm {} \;

then restarted computer.

now to see what happens...

24 hours later and the windows seem to be holding their positions and remembering what they are supposed to look like, plus, importantly, the icons are where I left them.

That is not to say they will stay that way - I thought I had it all sorted once before!

I don't have bootcamp or similar running at all.

"Nude" did take it's time, I'll admit, but it said it found and disposed of over 1700 files, so I guess that would take a while to do.🙂

One note, an external (firewire) drive I have attached has never lost it's settings, not even once... The problem has only been my main hard drive on my iMac.

In the meantime, it's fingers crossed (as well as toes, legs, etc). This is one of the very few things that really bugs me about Lion. I'd like to think it is sorted!

I used OnyX to delete the .DS_Store files on my hard disk. After the restart, I set my windows the way I like them and closed them. A few minutes later I re-opened the windows. They opened in the wrong locations, wrong sizes, wrong views. So, deleting the .DS_Store files may not always restore the Finder's sanity. It didn't for me. This has to be a serious bug in Lion Finder.

So, besides this serious bug, I also have the frequently reported problem of the keyboard illumination setting being ignored. I have mind set to OFF. But after a few minutes of darkness, the keyboard is illuminated. I then manually turn if off (or dim it down). A few minutes later, the keyboard is illuminated at full brightness. I have reset the SMC. No change. I also repaired permissions; no change.

Both of these problems appeared immediately after upgrading my MacBook Pro from 10.6.8 to 10.7. Both problems still exist with 10.7.1 While at first glance, these problems should not be related, the fact that settings I make are being ignored does make me wonder if they are related somehow. Is the same Apple engineer involved with the code for both? Is the same QA person involved with testing both? Hum...

We have downgrades our new Mini i7 to Snow Leopard because to this eggretious error. I am looking forward to hearing about the success or failure of Nude.

Same issue here.

I prefer List view for all of my windows, sorted by Name, with a vertical orientation for the window. Sometimes Finder will hold this for a while, but more typically after the passage of anywhere from a few minutes to several hours (even after a Restart), it falls back to a horizontal window view and ignores the Name sort.

Dang! Okay, everything has been fine and I really thought I had cracked it. External drives, main hard drives - all held settings, window size etc then tonight, randomly, it all turned to custard.

Firstly opening a folder opened right where the parent folder was - size the same, setting the same although I had previously set it to icon view (not list view like the parent folder) and a different size, based on top left corner of screen.

Then I went to the applications folder from my main Finder window - then back to home, only to find everything exactly where Lion wanted it - no resemblance at all to where I had everything placed and it had been happily residing since Saturday.

Is anyone from Apple actually reading this? This is hugely frustrating!

BTW, external drives continue to hold settings and continue merrily...

😢 😢 😢

Yeap, don't bother deleteing the .DS_Store files, the probem has retunred for me as well....

the most frustrating aspect is how it seems to go back to a cluttered mess as if reverting to another saved version of something stores who knows where. the same icons that pile on top of each other do it again, other move around...

Oooh... Freaky! Visual gymnastics... Booted the iMac (shut down last night with the main Finder window open and all icons set where I wanted them) and watched as the window reopened itself - with the icons where I wanted them... And then watched as they reorganised themselves to suit Lion right before my eyes without me even touching the mouse or keyboard.

A screen shot of the wibndow compared to one taken last week shows Lion was putting the icons in exactly the same places including piling them on top of each other...

I think you are right, Steven... Lion is storing info somewhere and defaulting to it over and above our own user settings. But WHY!?!?

This is a Lion bug which most likely will be be fixed in 10.7.2. I agree that it is extremely annoying, and something that Apple must fix soon.

we can hope.

I also have many icon layout problems with 10.7.1 Finder.

For me also the Finder window size always defaults to 4,0 1436,878.

I change this in the com.apple.finder.plist file to 0,0 1440,878 which is fullscreen.

It never sticks. When I recheck the plist it has reverted to 4,0 1436,878.

It somehow always finds a way to revert to this setting.

Interestingly when I go to the user library folder in Finder I only see one com.apple.finder.plist file. However, if I do a spotlight search for the file within that folder (~/Library) I find seven instances of the file all named com.apple.finder.plist !

Hoping 10.7.2 sorts this.

As a follow-up, I tried the utility Nude (as per the suggestion of wyrmsmaug in this discussion). I allowed Nude to act on my entire Documents folder and since then (two nights) have had no further window sizing or View Option problems. I'll be keeping an eye on this, but for the moment I'm happy.

In regad to the utility, itself, I had problems with Nude crashing after dragging files to it. However, it seems to have done its work prior to each crash. While the action by Nude was almost instantaneous, the utility does not provide much feedback and little or no information about what it is doing. However, I won't complain about details so long as it works.

Follow-up:

Unfortunately, Nude does not seem to have made changes that would hold (they only held together for about 3 days). Window sizing again became erratic, today. So, I tried the utility "iRemove .DS_Store files". It took much longer than Nude to handle the removal of the .DS_Store files, but provided feedback at the end of the process indicating that all of those files on the mounted disks had been deleted. This utility did not crash.

After a Restart, the window sizing and options seem to be holding; however, I'll keep an eye on it and see if the problem returns.

Follow-up:

The fix provided by "iRemove .DS_Store" did not last long (about 15 hours). However, what I noticed is that it seemed to be fine until I logged out, another user of my computer logged-in, and then when I logged-back in, the problem re-emerged. Not sure if that was coincidental or has some actual relationship to the problem. However, at the moment, I am back to square one. Hope Apple will be able to address this at the system level rather than users having to address this via third-party utilities and the repeated need to delete all .DS_Store files.

From my observations there is clearly some kind of other repository of finder window settings I'm not yet aware of because even after removeing all .DS_Store files, some of my OLD folders (pre OS 10) seem to still revert (to some extent) back to how they would have been under OS 9? Icon sizes even in one folder the size was very small with names on the right, and it reverted to that again.

I did a search for Desktop DB and Desktop DF files etc., and only found 4 in folders unrelated to the ones reverting to such settings, and only on one drive.

something somepace is clearly storing settings, yet at the moment I have not found where...