Windows no longer remembers my folder views.

pluviosilla · Oct 17, 2025

I have vision problems and for years I've made heavy use of Quick Reference folders on my Desktop that contain shortcuts with big icons. I don't want to force ALL folders to have this Large Icon view, just these Quick Reference folders. They allow me to jump to various locations on my machine quickly.

For example:

Note that this is NOT a folder containing multimedia, so I don't get the Large Icon view I want by configuring multimedia folders to be a certain way. This is a regular folder with regular shortcuts. In the past, Windows would just remember my preferred view of Large Icons.

But after the last update, Windows 11 stopped remembering the views in these folders. ChatGPT asked me if the folder containing the shortcuts was ReadOnly. I checked and verified that it was, at which point ChatGPT told me that possibly OneDrive kept changing the permissions on the folder, so I uninstalled OneDrive, since it is not something I use and in fact I need my Microsoft cloud storage for other purposes (not automatically backups) and resent the pushy way Microsoft keeps trying to ram OneDrive down my throat.

But that didn't fix the problem. So ChatGPT recommended a few registry tweaks. Nothing worked.

What might be causing this and how do I fix it?

dacrone · Oct 17, 2025

Increase Folder View Settings Cache Memory Size in Windows 11

This tutorial will show you how to change or increase the folder view settings cache memory size for your account in Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, and Windows 11 to have Windows remember more of your folder view settings. You can change the folder view settings in Windows to what you want...

www.elevenforum.com

See how many are being remembered now. You can either clear out saved and reconfigure them or try to extended the max number.

Try3 · Oct 17, 2025

There are limits to how many changes to folder view settings & the total number of individual folder views Windows can remember at a time.
Increase Folder View Settings Cache - ElevenForumTutorials

Denis

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It's really worth making time to browse through the ElevenForum Tutorial index - there's a shortcut to it at the top of every ElevenForum page [within the Tutorials dropdown list].
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glasskuter · Oct 17, 2025

pluviosilla said:
so I uninstalled OneDrive, since it is not something I use

You do use it if you sign in with a Microsoft account and are syncing your personal folders documents, desktop, pictures, and videos to Onedrive. In that case the default folder location is Onedrive, not a local drive
You can not arbitrarily uninstall Onedrive without first turning off folder syncing and getting your default folders back onto your system drive and then unlinking your account and PC from Onedrive. Is that what you did?

Try3 · Oct 17, 2025

pluviosilla said:
ChatGPT asked me if the folder containing the shortcuts was ReadOnly. I checked and verified that it was

I'm sorry but exactly what did you check?
- Right-click on a folder, select Properties.
-

- This darkened checkbox labelled Read-only ...?

It's almost meaningless. It certainly does not mean the folder is read-only.

Denis

Try3 · Oct 17, 2025

pluviosilla said:
ChatGPT recommended a few registry tweaks

You might as well have asked the ship's cat for advice on editing the Registry.
I hope you kept a list of the changes you made or made a system image beforehand.

Denis

pluviosilla · Oct 17, 2025

dacrone said:
Increase Folder View Settings Cache Memory Size in Windows 11

This tutorial will show you how to change or increase the folder view settings cache memory size for your account in Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, and Windows 11 to have Windows remember more of your folder view settings. You can change the folder view settings in Windows to what you want...

www.elevenforum.com

See how many are being remembered now. You can either clear out saved and reconfigure them or try to extended the max number.

Thank you for this rapid reply. Actually, I neglected to mention that one of the things ChatGPT had me do was to augment the view settings cache size. So when I ran the command you recommended in Powershell, I got 5,000 instead of 274.

pluviosilla · Oct 17, 2025

Try3 said:
I'm sorry but exactly what did you check?
- Right-click on a folder, select Properties.
- View attachment 149522
- This darkened checkbox labelled Read-only ...?

It's almost meaningless. It certainly does not mean the folder is read-only.

Denis

Thanks for the quick reply. Yes, that's exactly what I was looking at. In any case, changing it didn't have any effect, just as you predict.

pseymour · Oct 17, 2025

Paging Dr. @LesFerch

Try3 · Oct 17, 2025

pluviosilla said:
Yes, that's exactly what I was looking at

ChatGPT lied to you.
The thing it had you look at is virtually meaningless.
folder read-only indicator [by the highly-regarded forum member, KeithM] - TenForums

Denis

Try3 · Oct 17, 2025

pluviosilla said:
when I ran the command you recommended in Powershell, I got 5,000

So you need to
- reset the current number of views set, and/or
- increase the number of views it can remember.

So read tutorial Options 2 & 3.

Denis

LesFerch · Oct 17, 2025

Denis (@Try3) has provided the correct answer.

Alternatively, you can use WinSetView to set your preferred folder view defaults. Doing so will clear out all saved views, so that 5000 saved view limit will no longer be an issue. Then simply set those few folders containing shortcuts to large icons and the views will stick.

pluviosilla · Oct 17, 2025

Try3 said:
So you need to
- reset the current number of views set, and/or
- increase the number of views it can remember.

So read tutorial Options 2 & 3.

Denis

LesFerch said:
Denis (@Try3) has provided the correct answer.

Alternatively, you can use WinSetView to set your preferred folder view defaults. Doing so will clear out all saved views, so that 5000 saved view limit will no longer be an issue. Then simply set those few folders containing shortcuts to large icons and the views will stick.

Yes, when I created this thread, the platform provided a link to a related post and the author of the post was recommending two tools:

WinSetView, and
SwitchExplorer

I installed both of them, but I didn't think of using WinSetView to homogenize all the folders as a way of taking a load off the cache. That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for that suggestion!! I just ran it, and I think that may have fixed the problem. I'll know for sure in about an hour.

Windows no longer remembers my folder views.

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