I need a way to make a desktop.ini file apply to all folders without copying it into every single folder.This actually sounds like a pretty bad idea to me. Not to mention that a lot of common or system folders already have a desktop.ini -- how would you handle that?

What are you trying to ACCOMPLISH by doing this? Most of the THINGS you can set in desktop.ini can usually be set other ways as a default instead of a hack like copying it to every folder.WELL, I found out there was no way to do this PROVIDED by Microsoft, so I CRACKED and patched shell32.dll and it's working well. It was hard to get it working, but now it works without any issues. I made it read a file "C:\WINDOWS\global.ini" instead of the desktop.ini that it would find in the current folder. Now I can change the styles and background images of folders without having desktop.ini everywhere. The only downside is it now ignores the desktop.ini in the folder. I am going to try to make it so that if desktop.ini exists, it loads from that, otherwise it loads the defaults from global.ini.