What governs the position of last accessed folder in Windows Explorer?

Question

While navigating a series of directories I noticed there is a certain behavior Windows File Explorer exerts that changes the scroll position in the window when the number of directories is view in 'details' view mode, and the number of directories exceeds the space the display them all vertically. For example:

When scrolling through a bunch of folders and find the one I want to open, it is near the middle of the File Explorer Window (because I scrolled to this position):

However, after opening this directory and navigating back to the parent folder, the position is changed:

As you can see, the position of that last viewed directory gets moved almost all the way to the bottom of the window. This behavior makes is difficult to find and select the next directory I want to open because there is little space for my mouse (only a third of the next folder is visible since it is pushed all the way down to the bottom.. see the position of Effect Group 38).

So my question is this; What governs the position of last accessed folder in Windows Explorer and is there a way to get Windows File Explorer to remember the scroll position within a directory?

Answer 1

What governs the position of last accessed folder in Windows Explorer

This is the way that Explorer was programmed by the Microsoft developers. Their display algorithms will in most cases (not only your case) display the current line as one-before the last line.

In your case, they missed the right scroll position by several pixels.

is there a way to get Windows File Explorer to remember the scroll position within a directory?

No, unfortunately Explorer has no hooks for changing its built-in behavior. Explorer is notoriously very hard to modify.