Hello Old Toad,
I too am old... enough to be using Apple ][ computers since 1979 and my first Mac was the 128K model. Hence, I am familiar with the usefulness of safe mode operation, did not think it would help solve this problem, but tried it anyway. After starting up in Safe Mode, I opened my hard drive window and as it has done since Monterrey, it opened at a size and in a position that Apple determined, near the middle of my screen:
I like to have my hard drive window open in the top left corner of my screen, in list mode, with a wide "Name" column. Under every iteration of the Mac operating system since version 3, once you have opened this window, you could drag it to the position on the screen you wished it to stay, set the size that you wished it to be, and it would assume that position and size every time it was opened in the future. I tried this with my newly opened hard drive window, carefully positioning and resizing it over my "reference folder" already in that position:
I then shut down, rebooted the Mac Studio and double-clicked the hard drive icon to open its Window. It opened at a size that Apple determined, right in the middle of my cluttered Finder screen:
I then opened a NEW window, which opened the same size as the HD window, slightly offset as expected, but near thie middle of my screen. I could always in the past configure a window that way I wanted it and set it to open where I wanted it to be positioned on my screen. Although the first time I noticed the loss of this feature was when I purchased a 24" iMac running under Monterrey, but reviewing past posts here, I see that other folks have had repeatable window positioning problems as far back as High Sierra. I brought this matter up at a recent MUG meeting that was also attended by and Apple employee, who acknowledged this as a known problem and urged it to be reported to Product Feedback - Apple which I have done, but I'd really like a solution NOW!
