which had me uttering a few good old Anglo-Saxon words.
Sorry. Not a laughing matter. But I can imagine.
I'd switched it into "Audio Only Mode". Thankfully after switching MC26 out of "Audio Only Mode", which of course forces it to restart, when I switched to Display View it opened in windowed mode and has continued to do so every time I switched between Display View and Standard View.
I am now starting to wonder did my previous (misbehaving) install, and or settings that the user has no access to, get corrupted by MC26 itself and not something external to the program?
I don't use Audio Only Mode, but I thought I would try it to see what happens. Well, on my system, MC remembers to use Windowed mode even when set to Audio Only Mode.
I even set MC to Jump to Display View on play, and it jumped to the Windowed version of Display View. That was 100% repeatable.
I switched back to full Audio/Video/Image mode (turned off Audio Only Mode) and Display View still remembered to use Windowed mode.
Without going through everything in your environment I have no idea what to look at next. Maybe make a log of just starting playback of some audio, and switching to Display View, or having MC do that automatically, then save the log and share it. Maybe the log will have something in it, although it may be hard to work out, if possible at all.
Otherwise, if someone else can replicate the problem, maybe they can work it out.
EDIT: Good suggestion Wer. My system is set to Standard View and Last Location.