As to the opening post:

Windows may try to "catalog" your files by putting them in ridiculous places, but all the places where it puts them generally are in folders directly under your username in the "real" tree. If you make a folder directly in C:\ and put files there, it shouldn't move anything out of the folder, although it may put duplicates or shortcuts in the "My Pretty Shit" folders.

Much of the "rearranging" you may be seeing is not specifically a Windows thing. Quite a few programs you may have installed may also include "cataloging" (most "web storage programs" do their own versions of this, and many newer image editors do it). I just avoid such programs.

Windows givees you lots of choices about the order in which files are listed in Win Explorer, although not all of them are particularly helpful. As already mentioned, if you click on one of the columns on the top bar, the list will be sorted by whatever that column is displaying, and the list reverses the order each time you click.

If you right-click anywhere on the top bar, and click "More," you get a list of different column headers you can display. Put a check mark in the box to display one, and remove the check to hide it. Since Vista, there are about 128 different choices. I don't know whether a WinXP update may have added more than I remember were there - or maybe I just didn't bother to look for whether there were more available back then(?). In the "More" list, the ones checked are displayed at the top of the list, if you close and reopen that view. You can click on one and move it up or down in the list of the ones displayed. (one you've selected moves "one place" up or down for each click on the up/down, so it's a l..o..n..g hike to bring one from the bottom of the list all the way up if you don't do the close/open to jump it into the top of the list.)

Only a few of the column headers have "editable" properties, but as mentioned you can add/remove "tags" to change the list order if you display a tags column. I use the simpler expedient of nearly always including a date (yymmdd or simillar) at the front of file names, and/or for special purposes starting the filename with a short number so that the "special" files for a particular use will appear in the order I want. A "!" at the beginning of the file name moves the file to the top of the list, and a "z" puts it at the bottom, if I want to move one temporarily for a particular use, but that "system" has worked since DOS 3 days so it's well enough known. Some "rented" music files may not tolerate filename editing though.

I afraid I don't recognize the "docking" feature described. It's probably one those (many) "features" I knew immediately would be annoying and blocked in my initial setups.

In recent Windows, even if you log on as "Administrator" most things you do actually are run in a less privileged mode, so Windows will still ask for "permission" any time something actually requires "Administrator" authority. I haven't found anything you can do about that without going deep into somewhat arcane security settings and it hasn't seemed worthwhile to me to investigate what can be done.

John