I use list view quite a bit. I'm mostly interested in the size and the date columns and turn the others off. I was really happy to find that I could drag the size column to be before the date column since it's more important to me. Unfortunately, it always reverts to the default column order on new windows or windows switched to list view. I wanted any folder that was asked to display in list view to retain my preferred order.
I could, of course, open a new window, set it to list view, move the columns, and close it again to set the "global default" for new windows to list view with my preferred column order. But I didn't want to use a list view global default; I just wanted any window that I switched to list view to come up with the proper column order.
Read the rest of the article for an explanation of how to make the Finder retain your preferred column order for any window you set to list view...
I decided to see if the finder preferences had any way of remedying this little problem and they did. If you edit the finder preferences, com.apple.finder.plist in your user's Library/Preferences folder, you can change the default order of the columns.
I use BBedit, but any text editor should work. Just open up the preferences and look for:
<key>StandardViewOptions</key>A few lines down from there will be a group of <dict> tags with five <key> properties in them.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020420093812931