Frustrating Folder Problem

I don't think this is the OS. I think this is an application issue. For instance, when I'm importing events into iPhoto '11, I'm getting them from about 5 folders deep on a firewire drive. Each time I pick another event to import, iPhoto defaults back to the same parent folder I got the last event from. And this is persistent across launches and even across reboots. I find that Xcode's context is the folder containing the xcode project file. Textedit remembers where I've been during a session as does Textwrangler and LibreOffice.

Somehow it doesn't surprise me you mention Word is clueless because Word is clueless on Win 7 as well. If I launch any MS Office app on Windows and try to open a document, I get relegated all the way up to the highest level in my folder hierarchy. The MS apps remember context only within the current session and sometimes not even then. Relaunching the app would be like you just bought the software and never used it before were it not for the recent docs list.

To me this is evidence that what you are seeing is most likely not just an application thing but more specifically a Microsoft application thing. As I don't have any MS software on my Mac at this time, I can't say whether I would see the same thing. I restored one of our old minis a few weeks back and for a moment I had Office 2004 getting in the way such that my wife couldn't open Office files in LibreOffice without being told you can't run PPC apps in Lion (Office 2004). A quick trip to the trashcan for Office 2004 solved that problem. The fact that on my wife's Mac, MS trialware registered itself in such a way it interfered with using another app that could have opened the file is an example of one of the reasons I don't use Windows any more.

 

It may be every app that you happen to use, but it's not every app.

In any event, there is a "recent places" section in the pop-up menu. Not as nice as having it stay where it was last, but it's only one extra click.