It may depend on which program window has the focus when you type your shortcut, or you may have installed another program that has changed your shortcuts.

What happens when you click on Search from the Start menu? (I don't have any little dogs on any of my XP setups so I can't help you there.)

Hi Bill,
thanks for the reply.
The focus is on the Explorer, but I just cant get it into search mode.
Usually I get fields to enter what type of data I am looking for or where I can enter the filename, but now it just returns a blank half (left page) with a tail waggling dog at bottom. The dog has always been there as "Search Assistant" but now all data entry fields are missing.

The file I was searching for I already found via DOS command "dir" and piping the output into a txt file, but as I am not the only one working with that machine, I have to fix the problem very soon.

Any help on curing this is ery much appreciated.

You don't have any options showing to change preferences or to choose what you want to search for?

Has anyone installed one of those desktop search toolbars that might have overridden this function?

You don't have any options showing to change preferences or to choose what you want to search for?
Has anyone installed one of those desktop search toolbars that might have overridden this function?

Actually, a double NO.
There is nothing in the menues and no toolbar stuff installed.
The most recent change to the system was the upgrade to SP2 some 4 weeks ago (yes, I waitet that long but had to install it as one video editing software I wanted to run requires it).

I am really clueless.

Does the F3 key show the same results?

How about:

File ¦ My Computer ¦ Search...

Or:

Start ¦ Search...

If those are showing the same problem do you have any recent backups you could revert to? Try a recent restore point to see if you can get this functionality back.

Bill,
F3 was one of the first things I tried and got the same result.
Anyway, fill try the other options later and maybe (worst case) have to restore my wayback into a working system.

Many thanks for your help.

Try this...

1) Right-click on "My Computer" and select "Search".
2) Select "Change Preferences" in the left-hand pane.

If you can't fix it this way, you'll need to hunt down the appropriate registry entry and delete/rename it (to restore defaults). You'll need Google for this.

Kaled.

1) Right-click on "My Computer" and select "Search".
2) Select "Change Preferences" in the left-hand pane.

I tried this and get the same result as before.
There is no place to change any preferences.

Anyway, thanks for the tips.

Did you install IE 7?
In that case uninstall it, the search should work, let Windows update do its work and reinstall IE 7.

I suggest actually just loading the program "Lookout for Outlook".

Although it's title suggests it is only for Outlook, it is one of the better search tools I have found.