You are absolutely right to call this auto-sorting a horror. It's one of the rudest behaviors for an OS to behave - to shuffle and scatter his files while he is still working on them with the folder still open. It violates good usability and accessibility.
I can't imagine how making the items in a folder jump all over the folder to obey the sort order is more important than presenting them like XP did: existing items remain in place, new, renamed or modified items appear at the end until we press Refresh/F5. Then they get sorted. This is the desirable behavior of course. Not files jumping around while you are tracking the folder.
It is a complete nightmare, for me, it's impossible to use which is why I mainly keep my Windows XP PC around for file management. Too bad your XP PC died. I was so upset and furious about files not staying at the end in a list that I sent a million emails over the past 8 years to various Microsoft developers, even senior executives, appealing to their sense of reason and usability. I complained a LOT on Raymond Chen's blog (since he blogs about the Windows Shell). ALL IN VAIN. Microsoft doesn't care, nor do they understand how they turned a usable product into something completely unusable.
My blood still boils every time I am reminded of this auto sorting issue. I made a gazillion threads in Microsoft's forums and petitions asking them to create a simple hotfix to give an option to disable forced auto sorting in Explorer but they do not consider it a problem.
Auto sorting is so frustrating that I did try a lot of file managers just to get away from this shit but no file manager has all features and shell extension handlers of Explorer. It is for me, the number 1 serious usability issue with Explorer. It's so horrible but I've had to live with it all these years because of Microsoft's forced obsolescence of XP.
You can't imagine how much frustrated and angry I am at Microsoft for the forced auto sorting (constant F5) feature. Because it can be a trivial fix for them but they don't even care enough to change anything because they don't understand usability.
You must've probably seen my rants everywhere on the web of just how much I loathe this "feature". I posted at dozens of places over the web asking how to disable it.
I liked Explorer++ (a third party file manager) but for me, any other file manager is out of the question. I refuse to use third party apps for such a basic function as file management (and because all others are worse than Explorer including the commercial ones). They don't support the full shell extensions that Explorer does.
I tried using Process monitor too to observe if there was some registry key involved since it doesn't sort in the root of a local disk drive. Explorer also does not auto sort for me inside folders on removable USB flash drives or on network shares! It only auto sorts inside local folders. I swear if I found the person who coded this I will yell at him and take away his things while he's in the middle of working on something important. Raymond Chen also gave a stupid excuse on his blog about this:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/arc ... 62286.aspxNot giving the option to change such functionality is the typical behavior of Microsoft, why so many people dislike this company. Microsoft OS's are dumbed down further and further from version to version without any options to configure the system according to the user's wishes. They take away well designed behaviors due to carelessness or not having given much thought to the impact of the change. There's no excuse for not at least making a registry entry or Group Policy setting to disable the continuous live sorting. This annoying behavior is hard-coded into Explorer.
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