You can open a window such as documents or whatever you want and use the
mouse to drag the edges to a full window because windows is rather idiodic in
this, no matter how many times you change the settings it seems to always
"reset" itself to open the window the way it was the last time you used it
(except for maximized window) this method will let windows now that it shoul
re-open the same way next time. The way to do this for IE is look on the
taskbar for the icon for IE, you can right click>properties>run and in the
drop-down menu choose maximized and then apply and ok, this tells windows
that when you reopen IE to always open it as a maximized or full window and
in a perfect windows it would actually remember, but this changes anytime it
decides to change so you can try it, but don't be surprised if in a day,
week, month or whenever windows decides to it will open the window as a small
window again. As for the windows browsers (computer, control panel etc.)
there is a way to do this for them as well, but I can't recall exactally how
at this moment, the best thing to do is what I suggested about dragging the
window with the mouse and that should work, you may have to do it over and
over for different types of windows, but once you have done it once to each
window they will always re-open maximized unless you open it and reduce the
size and then close it again(this will not work for the
open/upload/download/save windows, they are always small windows, I don't
know why.)