How can I make 'Columns View' default?

[owen-b]

Hi all,

Possibly a silly question but it's got me stumped. Whenever I restart or turn on afresh my iBook (600mhz, 640ram, G3, OS 10.3.9) and double click on the hard drive, it opens in Icon view by default, and they're all scattered around, not in any order. It never used to do this. It always used to open in the columns view.

A Mac guru at work said to select the columns view, then close the window, and then when you re-open it, columns will be default, and that works until I restart the Mac.

How do I HARD set it to columns by default? And what have I done to select 'messy icons' by default??
Cheers!
Owen

[Satcomer]

This is going so easy you are going to slap your forehead in disgust. Just go to the Finder's Preferences (from the Finder Menu) and put a check mark in "open new windows in column view". To clean up icon spreading in Finder Windows and on the Desktop, just go the the Finder menu item "View" and select "Show View Options" and select to "snap to a grid" (along with some other View settings).

[owen-b]

Cheers mate, but here's the thing: I just checked that, and it was already selected!

I know how to clean up icons etc, but this is why I'm so confused as to why everytime the computer has loaded up lately, the main harddrive window has opened with icons, scattered around.

Has something possibly got corrupted somewhere and is there a simple 'rebuilding' operation I need to do to iron the problem out?

Cheers satcomer, more advice welcome!

Owen

[Satcomer]

I think I may have a solution. I think you may have a corrupt Finder preference file. Just mosey (yes I am an American) over to users->Your user account->Library->Preferences-> and find the item " com.apple.finder.plist". Just trash that item then log out and them log back in. Once back in go to the finder's Preference again and select the column view options again.

[owen-b]

Cheers again mate, but to no avail. I deleted said prefs file, logged out, logged back in, immediately went to the Finder preferences and clicked the box, opened up the hard drive window and LO! Icon view again.

Selected column view, closed the window, reopened it, and it was still column view. Logged out, logged back in, and back to Icon view.

Is there something else somewhere that's overriding it? Another prefs file that's corrputed perhaps? A selection somewhere that needs to be unselected??

Owen

[Satcomer]

This is a tuff one, have you Repaired Permissions (with Disk Utility) yet?

[bobw]

Get Cocktail and use it to delete the DS_Store files.

[owen-b]

Okay - what is repairing permissions? How do I do it, what does it do?

And what is Cocktail, what are DS_Store files, and what does deleting them achieve?

Cheers folks!
Owen