How to stop Explorer navigation pane from opening it's own folders?

On my 2nd bootable backup drive (W7 freshly compiled from NTLite), when I click on a drive letter in the navigation pane, it keeps on opening folders there and the center pane. That makes it really hard it use the left pane w/o manually condensing it back down to just the single 'Computer' entry. I have multiple drives with a total of seven partitions, I don't want to have it open both listings of the partition I'm interested in.

I realize I can click on the "-" before the drive or Computer entry to collapse the directory everytime, but that is a real pain and doesn't solve the problem.

My main bootable drive (loaded with W7 from RT7 Lite) does not have this problem. Neither does opening up 'save as' or 'open' when in a program.