Help: folders that won't stay closed in list view

[Jim Witte]

   Has anyone else had this problem?  I had it in Panther (whatever  
10.3.x was - I'm starting to forget the sequence of cats..), and I  
thought it had been fixed..  I have it with my /Applications/ 
Codewarrior folder (this is version 10 of CW)  I checked permissions  
on the .DS_Store files in /Applications and /Applications/ 
Codewarrior, and all are RW for all 'entities' (owner, group, gust),  
and I am the owner of both files.

   Before, I had set the owner of /Applications to me, then did  
'Apply to all enclosing' and after a while it said it couldn't do it  
because it didn't have sufficient priviledges..  WHAT!!??  I thought  
that's why I just authenticated with my password!  The folder still  
won't close and stay close in list view.  Any ideas why this occurs?   
Rebuilding the Applications folder from scratch seemed to fix the  
problem, except that now Cmd-A takes me to my ~/Applications folder,  
not /Applications (unless the contents of /Applications is somehow  
symlinked  to ~/Applications or something..)

   OT to this, but it would be nice if it would tell me which file..   
(for that matter, it would be nice if OSX told me exactly which files  
in a lot of situations - a multiple-drag where it runs into copies,  
there must be other situation..  But then, the MacOS has *never* told  
the user much - as opposed to Windows, which often tell the user too  
much)