Okay this was one of those things that always annoyed me, but I never really put any effort into fixing.

At work we have *REALLY* long shares on our network so when I would open up explorer or anything I would see:

This_Is_A_Dumb_Share_Name on ‘Server Description goes here (servername)’ (Q:)

Well that means the left pane of my explorer window had to be huge before I could see that the drive letter on that was “Q”    Very annoying.

Well you can change this behaviour very easily with a registry key.  (Only tested in XP)

Create a new REG_DWORD here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer

Name this new REG_DWORD “ShowDriveLettersFirst”

Value

0= Show drive letters after description (default)

1 = Show drive letters first only on network drives, local drives show after

2 = Don’t display a drive letter (WHAT?!  Why would you do that?!)

4 = Show drive letters before descriptions

So set the value to 4.   Restart and there you go!