In case anyone is interested, we have an irc channel, #donationcoder on the efnet FREENODE network.

For those that don't know, irc is kind of like a chat room system. that has been around for almost 20 years.

More info about irc can be found at http://www.mirc.com/irc.html.

the idea of using plain old built-in windows explorer gives me nightmares  :o
i am one of those people that spends a great deal of their time using a file browser, so to me its important to have a good one, like total commander, powerdesk, directory opus, etc.

directory opus (maybe the others too) has a nice feature that can show hidden files with a different color or something so that you can leave them visible all the time while still seeing them clearly.  i must say i do not like the idea of having them invisible at all.

however i wonder if your problem might not be solvable with a little .reg file pair that toggled on and off the view hidden files registry setting (i'm assuming its a registry setting), and just adding these reg file shortcuts as buttons on the file browser (or desktop if you are using windows explorer).

that's a good idea, i will try it and see how hard it is to do, might be easy to implement.