Local Disk expansion - can I prevent

I usually access my drives by right clicking on Start and selecting explore. One of my pet peeves is that the local disk is expanded by default. I seldom want anything from it and have to collapse it and scroll down to my network drives at the bottom. Is there a tweak or setting to prevent this automatic expansion?

 

Whenever you right click and select explore from somewhere, it will naturally explore from that location. When you do so from the start button it starts explore in the folder where the start menu is located. To get around this you have two choices.

I'll assume you are using Win XP

You can right click on my computer desktop icon (you may have to enable this if you use Win XP) and explore from there. I'm recommend this one as it's easiest. You can enable the desktop my computer icon from the display properties control panel. Click on desktop and then customize.

or

You can create a shortcut on your desktop, target the file located at c:\windows\system32\explorer