An annoying problem that I experienced under Win 95, and it came across when
I upgraded to Win 98, was with the Open/Save/Save As dialogue boxes in all
of my windows based apps defaulting to Sort by Size rather than
alpha-numerically. I placed several calls to MS support and spoke to
different techs with no luck until finally we stumbled onto this fix.

1) Close your running Applications
2) open any folder from windows (not from Explorer)
3) click Views and Details
4)click the Name button to sort alpha-numerically
5)close the window by holding down the CTRL Key while pressing the x in the
upper right corner to close (this will cause a forced or hard close which
windows will remember)
6) Open an Application and go to Open file. Your dialogue box should now be
sorted alpha -numerically

this also works if the dialogue box is sorted in reverse order or by Date.

I used to be a Mac user. A shortcut on a Mac to close all open windows is to
hold down the Ctrl Key and click a little window icon in the upper right
corner of the window (where the x is on a PC window). I suspect that I had
tried this once with my PC while I was in Sort by Size. All open windows
didn't close as I had hoped, but inadvertently I had caused the hard close
to be activated thus causing my dialogue boxes to open in Sort By Size. I
fought with this for several months.

Since learning this trick I've used it to force windows to retain the
settings that I've given them. For example I like my browser window to
always open to a predetermined size which fits inside the Taskbar and
Toolbars I have set on the edge of the Desktop. I resized the browser window
to the size I want and then use the forced close as above and the windows
seems to keep the size for a long time.

Harry Ohrn
http://newlife-win98.server101.com/