Getting rid of Vista's annoying custom folder view

Today I found a simple solution to stop Vista from using custom folder views for folders that contain media, such as the My Music folder.

Me being a big fan of the 'details' folder view, I was always annoyed by Vista's adding new headers 'artists', 'album', 'rating', and removing my own preferred 'date modified', 'type' and 'size'. For each and every folder I had to select the right columns, resize and arrange them. Sometimes I even needed to select the attributes from a list in a new window. A hell of a job and the good old 'apply view to all folders' button seemed to avoid folders with media content.

So here's the solution. Right click the folder in question, e.g. "My music", and go to the 'customize' tab. In the first dropdown-list, you can choose a template for your folder. In the case of 'my music', this will default to "Music details". Selecting "all items", will forever eliminate your problem for this folder. Selecting "Also apply this template to all subfolders" will eliminate it for all subfolders too.

All you need to do next, is repeat this procedure for any other media folders ("My pictures", "My Videos" and pretty much anything that starts with "My"). Now, the view headers will have changed and you can pick out whichever you like and resize them to your liking. Finally, go to "organise", "folder and search options" and to the "view" tab. Click "apply to all folders", confirm, and enjoy a unified look of all your folders within Windows Vista!



Now I'm wondering if I could use this newly-discovered feature of Vista for my own benefit. In the next days I'll try to figure out if it's possible to change the way those templates ("All Items", "Pictures" etc.) behave.