http://www.techsupportforum.com/microsoft-support/windows-vista-windows-7-support/414046-opening-explorer-new-windows-unwanted.html http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-CA/w7itprogeneral/thread/e5ef58b5-a330-4eed-9c10-638c3b2c8f98 What my problem is, for some reason something screwed with the shell extensions or some application incompatibility/feature is messing with it(seen a report of a Sony driver causing this as well). I right click on a folder and "Open" is in bold, yet if I double-click it opens in a new window. I have tried a few things, such as unchecking and rechecking the checkboxes in Folder Options to try to "force" it to open in the current window. Also tried doing a restore, but it seems that a "critical" update is blocking me from restoring.. I removed everything I have installed(according to the affected programs list in system restore) since this started happening with no luck. This happened once before and a clean reinstall worked.. But I would rather not have to do it again only to install the culprit program that is causing this issue again(if that is the case, which i suspect it is) So far this is the only real problem I have with Windows 7, which is saying a lot for me :) Any assistance is greatly appreciated, as I would hate to have to reinstall. Thanks Edit: Uninstalling a lot of the non-essential programs, to see if one of them just caused a change that lay dormant for whatever reason.. Hopefully one of them will turn out to be the problem, and hopefully the uninstaller will remove whatever problem file caused this fiasco

Hi,By default, Windows 7 opens folders within the same process. I noticed that you have performed some tests without avail. I did a further test including modifying registry, however, it doesn't take effect neither. I suspect that there may be some system files corrupted. I recommend you to perform a Startup Repair.Best RegardsDale