Finder files always in reverse alphabetical order in List View

Hi all,
Ever since I upgraded to Mountain Lion from Snow Leopard, I've experienced an intermittent quirk with Finder. I generally keep most files in folders by alphabetical order. But in my Applications folder, Finder is stuck on keeping them in reverse alphabetical order, which is annoying. I've never had this issue in previous releases of OS X becuase there was always the small triangle to invert order, but this triangle doesn't appear in my Applications folder. Only my Applications folder has a weird white bar with Name, Size, etc, as opposed to the gray one that appears in every other folder in the OS.
I have tried to remedy this via the following:
Changing from List View to other views--this puts them in normal alpha order, but I like apps in List View so I can see many of them at a glance
Sorting by other categories (file size, etc.) and then switching back
Clicking on the name bar with every possible combination of buttons (Fn + click, Ctrl + click, etc.)
All to no avail. Is anyone else experiencing this problem? It only happens with the Applications folder, and only in List View.
Thanks!

I also have this problem, and the work around works for me, but...
This has got to be a bug, right? There is nothing, anywhere that I can see, that controls whether it is alpha ascending or alpha descending. The "fix", such as it is, is to ignore the Arrange By menu and use the column headers to select the sort order.
In fact, to bulletproof it (because I will forget eventually) the best solution would be to remove the "arrange" menu altogether because it does not do anything that sorting by column headers does not do. In fact, it does less. In even more fact, it does worse than less.
Apple is keenly persuing minimalism. So why does the arrange menu exist? And if it does exist, why did no-one test that it works rationally?
The corollary of all this is that the Arrange By menu does the same thing as clicking the menu headers, but when you use it, it disables them.
I have been banging my head on my desk since I bought my new machine with Mt Lion on it about the wretched headers not setting the sort order and it is because some - numbskull is not the _only_ word that comes to mind - has decided one selection mechanism for the sort function should disable the other. ¿Eh?

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http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2002-9/54100/FileListPic.jpg
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