Was this “always open” issue ever resolved? I’m still seeing the behaviour. I’m on DT 3.8.5.
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Is Preferences > General > Interface > Sidebar > Automatically expand & collapse enabled?
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What view are you using, e.g., List view?
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Automatically expand and collapse is not enabled
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List view is being used
I have a desktop and a laptop, which are synchronised using Bonjour.
Strangely, this behaviour only occurs on the laptop (from which the desktop synchronises).
- Are you expecting the expansion state to be synced between machines?
- If so, that’s not supported at this time.
No, I’m just expecting the database not to revert to expanding to the same group every time I open it, even though I’ve closed that group, or opened some other group before closing the database. I haven’t wanted to work in that particular group for some time now, but every time I open the database it is as if the database itself wants me to begin there. Which I don’t.
In the end, it finally became so irritating that I’ve just split up the database into several smaller ones. I’m just hoping that I don’t get a repeat of the problem and find myself looking at the same expansion every time I open a database, and having to close it before I can get on with my work.
I came here to post this same issue. It’s driving me insane. I have a group called “Meetings” with a bunch of groups named for years (e.g. “2022”), and every time I select the Meetings group, year 2022 expands. Makes me want to delete it, because it pushes down 2023 in the list, and I have to collapse it every. single. time.
But I have good news, @mbbntu. As I was typing out all the ways I tried to fix this, I realized I forgot some things and accidentally found the solution. Simply close the groups you want, and press Ctrl+S to save the view.
That solved it for me. I can now save whatever view I want (which is also great!). The Ctrl+S shortcut is for Save, but it’s greyed out usually. Use the keyboard shortcut.
To the DevonTHINK guys, this feature is actually kinda interesting now that I’m aware of it, but it’s so easy to accidentally press Ctrl+S while you’re not editing a document that it has probably already driven some of us to murder. I hope @mbbntu isn’t in prison. 
@cgrunenberg would have to comment further but that command should have no relationship to the state of windows and their elements.
Actually only modified documents can be saved, the shortcut (and its menu item) don’t affect the user interface.
I went back to reproduce this, and it is reproducible from one account on my computer (“A”), but not from the other account (“B”). Both are running the same installation of DTP (3.9), but have different databases open.
There is something horribly inconsistent with the state persistence on the database I’m using in user account “A”. On “B”, it always remembers the last expansion state of the group, as expected. On “A”, I can’t detect a pattern. But on the other hand, if I Ctrl+S, it always remembers the expansion sate of the group. If I find time to test more, I’ll do so.
If you can think of an experiment to run, let me know. 
If we can reproduce this, we will.