VLC twofer

1) iv done something weird to it, where it now defaults to some grey box (media browser on left / playlist on right) before/after playing a clip. up till now it defaulted to the actual video screen.

i thot unchecking "dock playlist" might be the secret, but that just changed things into yet ANOTHER default.

before i go reinstalling it, could someone just tell me WHERE the setting is for this?!

2) in windows media and some other players things play in the order they're loaded. and it's easy to change order even after loading.

in VLC, no matter how you load things, they sort themselves into pseudo-alphabetical order ("explorer" order). how do u override this?

really REALLY annoying!

talking about playlists in general, btw -- not the playlist-on-top thing from problem (1).

TIA....