I appreciate the "Shutdown Directory Opus when the last Lister closes" option; it's a major reason I upgraded from v8. The resident "dopus.exe" process always interfered with Truecrypt (volumes could not cleanly dismount) until I forcibly terminated it in Process Explorer.
However, when I enable this option and start DO cold (with no pre-existing process), the folder tabs I've saved with the default lister fail to appear (all other settings/attributes load properly AFAICT). But if I open the DO shortcut again, it loads a new second lister that does show all my folder tabs. Subsequent opened listers also have the correct tabs, and only the first has this problem.
When the option is disabled so that a "dopus.exe" process is allowed to linger, the first lister opened from the shortcut shows all my folder tabs as expected.
To summarize the problem: Folder tabs (associated with the default lister) do not load properly unless dopus.exe is already running when the lister is opened.
Must be down to the settings under Preferences - Launching Opus. Try setting the Startup page to open the Default Lister.
BTW, you may find with Opus 9 that you don't have to exit it anyway. A problem with it holding locks on removable drives was found & fixed a few years ago and since then I haven't run into it (and I use them a lot myself).
You are correct. It was set to "Open a saved Lister layout" (which was how I originally tried (and failed) to get this working). Then I focused on using the default lister and forgot to change it back. Changing it to "Open the Default Lister" fixed things. I just managed to save the tabs into my saved layout, so now I've got it working both ways. I think originally I was trying to define the folder tabs under Lister->Styles but that's obviously the wrong way to do it (it only ever loaded the folder tabs when I clicked the style in the tab bar, not on startup).
You are also correct that the "Shutdown" option isn't needed for Truecrypt to work properly. I just tested it.