Ok, thanks, I understand now! I always have the thumbnail strip collapsed in the preview window, so when I was making changes to these preferences I couldn't see anything happening.
Re. 'soft rotation indicator' - An icon is displayed for all the vertical shots I take with my D700 (I have the camera set to flip them the right way up). Is that how it should be?
Feature Request. It would be nice to have more 'Restore To Defaults' buttons in the Preferences - particularly with regard to color elements of the interface, which I imagine you spent some time to get looking good, and can easily be messed up by the user