Broni - many thx for your attention and research ........ now you mention the ctrl+close move, I remember that from the past.
I seem to recall that is never seemed to work but I tried it just now on a couple of save and open dialog boxes, in hopes - and again - it failed!
This was following a fresh boot too.
Oh well - puzzling ...... seems I might be SOL unless there is something else. The string you found in registry is hard to interpret and so equally hard to see how to make any safe or useful tweak.
Thx again tho - much appreciated.
I'll keep looking.