Why does Windows Explorer Show .zip Files as Folders ?

August 30, 2007

My question applies to Windows Vista and Windows 2003 Server.

There's one aspect of Windows Explorer that's driving me absolutely nuts.

The left pane traditionally shows a hierarchical list of logical and

physical folders, letting the user drill down the folder tree by expanding

and collapsing the folder nodes. The problem is that if any of these folders

contains a .zip file, these files show up as *folder nodes* in the

hierarchy. I despise this. Since many of my archive folders contain nothing

but .zip files (and lots of them), and because folder nodes tend to

auto-expand when clicked, each click of a folder node generates this

enormous list of .zip files *in the folder pane.*

Is there any way to turn off this irritating behavior and force Windows

Explorer's left pane to do what it was originally designed to do, that is,

to simply show folders???

My only solution is to rename all of my zip files with a different file

extension but this would be a major problem for me. Any ideas?

Jules

August 30, 2007

Re: Why does Windows Explorer Show .zip Files as Folders ?

I don't know of any way to change this behavior. I find it annoying and

confusing. I often close what appears to be a zip folder, only to find I've

mistakenly closed Windows Explorer and have to start my task all over. It

also means when I view a normal folder it seems to have many sub folders,

when this is not true, it just has many files. Some people claim they get

used to this, but that's because they only use Vista. The rest of use that

use many computers are constantly confused by the inconsistent behavior.

--

Richard Mueller

Microsoft MVP Scripting and ADSI

Hilltop Lab - http://www.rlmueller.net

--

"Lamont Sanford" <yaBigDummy@sanford.son> wrote in message

news:E_mdnTDU2cHPVUvbnZ2dnUVZ_ramnZ2d@giganews.com...

> My question applies to Windows Vista and Windows 2003 Server.

>

> There's one aspect of Windows Explorer that's driving me absolutely nuts.

> The left pane traditionally shows a hierarchical list of logical and

> physical folders, letting the user drill down the folder tree by expanding

> and collapsing the folder nodes. The problem is that if any of these

> folders contains a .zip file, these files show up as *folder nodes* in the

> hierarchy. I despise this. Since many of my archive folders contain

> nothing but .zip files (and lots of them), and because folder nodes tend

> to auto-expand when clicked, each click of a folder node generates this

> enormous list of .zip files *in the folder pane.*

>

> Is there any way to turn off this irritating behavior and force Windows

> Explorer's left pane to do what it was originally designed to do, that is,

> to simply show folders???

>

> My only solution is to rename all of my zip files with a different file

> extension but this would be a major problem for me. Any ideas?

>

> Jules

>

August 30, 2007

Re: Why does Windows Explorer Show .zip Files as Folders ?

Lamont

Everyone likes doing the same things in different ways. I have enjoyed the

way Vista handles and displays zip files. It gives you are quick way to

identify zip files and view their contents without the need to open a third

party program.

--

Ronnie Vernon

Microsoft MVP

Windows Shell/User