As you probably know there are several different Folder Views in Windows Explorer:

The Explorer keeps tracks of the last used View per Folder in the registry in the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags. This KB article sort of desribes this functionality.

But did you know that you can force a specific view for all folders?

It’s very easy, just set the following key and values:

; Force default explorer view to Details (mode = 4)
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ShellNoRoam\Bags\All Folders\Shell]
“Mode”=dword:00000004
“WFlags”=dword:00000000
“Status”=dword:00000001
“Address”=dword:ffffffff
“Vid”=”{137E7700-3573-11CF-AE69-08002B2E1262}”

Use the following values for Mode and Vid:

Or you can also set it into HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE to make it effective for every user on the system.