Is there a way to disable the default "copy" when you highlight items?

If I highlight several items in a folder, windows automatically creates a copy of those items. Is there a way to disable this?

Are you talking about highlighting and dragging?
If so right click drag to destination location then release. Select one of the options - copy, move,...cancel. Even though it says "copy" when dragging you get the options.

gini said:

If you select these files using the Control key and accidentally move your mouse as you do so, Windows assumes you've dragged the files and want to copy them.

I suppose that's the case -- that I accidentally moved the mouse. But is there a way to disable it altogether, or no?

Don't keep the mouse button pressed.

You can also hold Shift to explicitly move instead of copy. And there's a registry setting HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\DragWidth that specifies how many pixels (default is 4) you need to drag something for it to copy while holding Ctrl, but I don't know if the poster is comfortable editing the registry.

It's still not clear what's going on here though. bd74, exactly what combination of key presses and mouse movements/clicks are we talking about?

The best way to copy multiple files in a folder without accidental copying is as follows.

1. Select the files using the keyboard.

For continuous files, move the file selection to the first file using arrow keys. Press and hold Shift key and move the arrow key to select subsequent files.

For non continuous files, press CTRL key and select the required files by clicking on the required files by mouse.

2. Copy / Move procedure
Once the selection is complete, press CTRL+C to copy the files. To move the files instead of copying Press CTRL+X.

Open another explorer window, navigate to the target window and press CTRL+V.

Once got used to this procedure, it is really fast to copy / move the files.

I have the same issue. When selecting multiple files using CTRL, I move the mouse wrong and Windows thinks I want to copy them. I already know how to copy. I don't WANT to copy them or move them. I don't need to know other ways to copy, or other keyboard shortcuts, same as the gentleman who first posted. I may be selecting files to do something to the id tags, if they're music files, or there are a number of other things I might want to do that have no relationship to copying. I merely want to select them. I'm talking about folders that have hundreds of files in them, in which the files I want to select cannot be arranged any way to make the files I want contiguous. If I were looking for all of one file type, or all files created on one particular day, it would be easy to order them to select them without using CTRL. As it is, I usually compromise when manipulating large numbers of files by doing them in small batches, in the hope that I can select a reasonable number before I mess up moving the mouse, and have to undo the copies and then reselect the files. Isn't there some way to disable the default copy? We already have perfectly satisfactory ways to copy things. I had a similar issue one time with accidentally selecting "create shortcut"--which I use maybe once a year--instead of delete from the context menu, not a lot, but often enough that it was an annoyance, and someone came up with a registry fix to remove it. There's got to be a registry key somewhere that you can edit to keep Windows from copying.