The Finder view mode and state of open and closed disclosures are stored in files named .DS_Store (which you don't normally see in Finder because it hides all files beginning with a period). You can prevent clients from creating these files on network volumes by doing the following from each user account on each client:
Start Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app).
Run this command in Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
Close Terminal.
After all user accounts have logged out of their machines (to make the change effective), you will still have .DS_Store files on the server that will be used by the clients, so you probably want to delete those. These files do not contain any needed information, just things like disclosure states and the position of files and directories in icon view. On the server, open a Finder window to the root of the shared directory. Then start Terminal, and type "cd " (with a space at the end) in the command line but do not press return. Click and hold on the icon at the top of the Finder window you opened. After holding the click for at least one second, drag the icon into the Terminal window and release the mouse button. This should add the path of your shared directory to what you've already typed. Press return and this will now be the "working" directory. Run the following command:
find . -name .DS_Store -exec rm {} \;
This will delete all of the .DS_Store files nested inside your shared directory, and will probably take some time to complete (potentially hours with a very large file system). It will be finished when a new prompt appears.
If you have any clients that are older than OS 10.4, I don't think this works for them. Any changes to the view mode, icon positions or disclosure arrows made directly on the server (as opposed to a network client) will still write a .DS_Store file which will be used by clients.
To always open in list view, try closing all Finder windows, then press Cmd-Shift-C to open a window at the root of the file system, then change to list view, press Cmd-J and check "Always open in list view." If it says "Always open in icon view" or "Always open in column view," uncheck it and the setting will change to list view. This setting is available in 10.5 but not 10.4. I'm not sure if this actually makes the difference, but I think that's what I did a long time ago and everything always opens in list view. We have a 10.4 machine, and I think it always opens everything in icon view. You could probably force 10.4 clients to use list view by causing a .DS_Store file to be creating that specifies list view, then using a terminal command to copy the file into every subdirectory, but that wouldn't work when new directories are created unless you create them by duplicating an existing directory containing the .DS_Store file. If you want to try this, I can tell you what the Terminal commands should be.
