Website file tree - cannot collapse folders

Question

Viewing the local pages in my site, when I try to collapse
folders, other folders mysteriously expand. So, I click on one +
sign and another folder changes from - to + (expanding). This
happens in both the panel view of the site folders as well as in
the large expanded view -- the one that looks a bit like Explorer
in Windows.
This does not happen every time, but most times. So, for
example, I'll collapse a first folder and maybe a second one, and
when I try to collapse a third folder it does not collapse -- and,
the first two folders expand. This is in DW 8.
I assume things should not be working this way. Any ideas?
Thanks.

Answer 1

I've been looking for this solution for a while, and as i had
65 sites that this was slowly affecting, i'm going to post my
solution, based on alan's recommendations.
generally, the outline below creates a REG file that will
remove all "Local Expanded Dir #" and "Remote Expanded Dir #"
values, and reset the "Local Expanded Dirs" and "Remote Expanded
Dirs" values to 0. and will do it for every site you have
configured within dreamweaver (in my case it was 65 of them to
fix). and it makes it easy to repeat the fix later when it gets
corrupted again.
1. open regedit, go to the key
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Macromedia\Common\8\Sites and check out
how many site folders you have listed (starts with 0). poke though
the site folders, and make a note of the site that has the most
"Local Expanded Dir #" or "Remote Expanded Dir #" folders - its the
number of these entries you're after.
2. create a .txt file, and add the following content:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Macromedia\Common\8\Sites\-Site0]
"Local Expanded Dir 0"=-
"Local Expanded Dir 1"=-
"Local Expanded Dir 2"=-
"Local Expanded Dir 3"=-
"Local Expanded Dir 4"=-
"Local Expanded Dir 5"=-
"Local Expanded Dir 6"=-
"Local Expanded Dir 7"=-
"Local Expanded Dir 8"=-
"Local Expanded Dir 9"=-
"Local Expanded Dir 10"=-
"Local Expanded Dirs"=dword:00000000
"Remote Expanded Dir 0"=-
"Remote Expanded Dir 1"=-
"Remote Expanded Dir 2"=-
"Remote Expanded Dir 3"=-
"Remote Expanded Dir 4"=-
"Remote Expanded Dir 5"=-
"Remote Expanded Dir 6"=-
"Remote Expanded Dir 7"=-
"Remote Expanded Dir 8"=-
"Remote Expanded Dir 9"=-
"Remote Expanded Dir 10"=-
"Remote Expanded Dirs"=dword:00000000
(blank line here)
3. modify the code abot to include enough lines to cover your
noted number of "Local Expanded Dir #" and "Remote Expanded Dir #"
entries. just copy/paste the lines and change the numbers to match
your needs.
4. now select and copy all the lines in the file, and
repeatly paste them at the end of the file, changing the HKEY site
number (at the end of the KEY) after each paste, until you have
created a group of lines for each site in your configuration. YOU
MUST LEAVE A BLANK LINE AFTER EACH GROUPING - this tells regedit
that a new KEY will be used, and won't work correctly if you don't
leave them.
5. At the top of the file, add this line for Windows 2000, XP
and Vista users:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
(blank line here)
5. save the file, and rename the extension to ".reg".
6. either double-click on the file to import it into the
registry, or open REGEDIT and import the file directly.
for my configuration, i created 100 lines for each of the
LOCAL and REMOTE sets (for these values, more is okay, as it's
telling the system to delete them, and if they don't exist, no big
deal), and duplicated the entire group 65 times. BE SURE TO LEAVE
BLANK LINES WHERE INDICATED.
Makes for a very large REG file, but it cleaned out all the
problems at once. when it becomes a problem later, i can just
modify the file to include more site numbers, and fix it quickly
again.
alan, thanks for the fix - i didn't find anything remotely
related during any google searches - just wasn't guessing the right
keywords i guess - so i finally thought to check dreamweaver forums
directly, and found it almost instantly.
Hope this helps the next person.
(edited to include references to blank lines - very critical
to working correctly)