I know it's not a Perl answer etc. etc. etc. but what about using something a little... more advanced than Windblows Exploder? xplorer² maybe? F5, [queue], ...

I personally believe that I must be a very lucky guy for I don't seem to experience all the inconveniences you're mentioning. To be fair I'm not that much of a file-manager-kinda-guy at all: which is full evident under OSen in which cli's are more common and powerful. But really, exploder doesn't explode too much here, and I'm not dissatisfied with it, for what I use it - and when I don't use it, I'm very comfortable with the file browsing mode of a very old version of a famous image viewer, which I more commonly use as a generic file manager... however strange this "setup" may seem! That's more or less all I need in daily operations. I've been more tempted and inclined to replace Windows' shell recently, and I've been investigating some possibilities. (Of course, this has nothing to do with the problem at hand.)