Question regarding drag and dropping files...

A buddy of mine called me today with a question that I didn't have an answer for and haven't experienced first hand so I figured maybe one of you had...

When he drags and drops files (moving them between folders) the files don't remain selected after the move. They do on both of my MBPs and my iMac and they did on his new MBP. He was using a older MBP (pre-unibody) when he experienced this. It wasn't his computer and he didn't think to check which version of OSx it was running.

Is there a way to turn that on and off? or is it a "feature" of 10.6? I run Snow Leopard on all of my macs and they all do it automatically.

He relies on that feature for file organization - he moves files from a CD, to the harddrive, and then immediately imports the same files into his software so he needs them to remain selected after the initial move.

I don't even know what that "feature" would be called and nothing came up in google.