No Search!

Hi, I have lost my search from Start Menu. The tab is there, but when I click it, nothing happens. I am running XP Pro w/ SP2. I can do a search with a window open, ie:My Computer, but the second time I tried it, the search ran for an hour before I finally stopped it. Then it started again, seemingly by itself as I wasn't near the PC, so I closed the window that I was searching from and now here I am again! I am only trying to do local search, not web. I recently had an IE hijack removed with help from the malware forums, but the search has worked since then. I just ran the series of malware tools from there too and am reported to be "clean" so I am posting here to see if anyone knows of this problem.

 

Close all programs then press F3 and see if the search window opens up.
Re-post with the result to let us know.

 

Nothing

 

The related system files could be corrupted but I am not clear as to which ones. I wonder if your system is still infected despite the 'clean' result you got from those spyware utilities you ran.
I could also be a collateral damage of the previous infection or a program that you use to modify system features could have created a new policy entry in the registry, could that be the case?
How famliar are you with Windows registry? Would you be able to check a few location if I asked you to?

I wold suggest you create a new user, doesn't have to be an admin, it could be a user limited account rights (XP Home Edition) or a poweruser (XP PRO).
Then log on to Windows with that user account to see if the FIND/SEARCH functionality works for this new account or not.
That is all I can suggest for now...

 

I am comfortable in the registry, but I will try the user account suggestion and post back w/ result.

 

No search in new user either!

 

Ok, I am still not clear as to what has caused this but let me have you check something in the registry for now:

START > RUN > regedit > OK.
Once Registry Editor opens up from the top menu:
Edit > Find (and do a search for the word Search, just like the screenshot below, mak sure the word is case sensitive).

Hopefully when you search from the top of the HIVE list, the first 2 entries should be within an Alpha numeric key following these branches:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\.....

and

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\CLASSES\CLSID\....

...either way let me know the results.

 

I think I found the problem. A couple of weeks ago, I was bored and playing around. I decided to change the text on my start button. I backed up explorer.exe and named the new one explorer1.exe. The registry keys you asked me to look for are pointing to explorer.exe and not explorer1.exe. So I'm going to rename my backup and change the modified one to explorer.exe in case this is happening with anything else. Thanks for the help and if it doesn't work, I'll post back later.

 

OK, first I tried to rename explorer1.exe in D:\Windows to explorer.exe. I saved a backup first and renamed my original from explorer.exe to explorer1.exe in a seperate folder out of D:\Windows. I could not rename because explorer.exe stays in there no matter what I do. So I went into the registry and changed the values that were pointing to explorer.exe and changed them to explorer1.exe. That did not work either. I am going to restore my original explorer.exe and change the registry values back and see how that works.

 

Yeah, I would never recommend or do renaming or modifying the 'Explorer.exe' file as it is critical for the GUI environment. I am not sure why you even did all the 'renaming' in the first place but I would not comment or could help with this, get rid of the explorer.exe that is not the original and change the registry values to 'explorer.exe', hopefully that will put things back to normal...

 

Yup, that did the trick. I restored the original explorer.exe and changed all registry values that point to it and my search is working. The only reason I did it in the first place is because I was bored and surfing around, on Microsoft.com, I might add, and I found an article on how to change the text of your start menu botton. I followed the directions which were to save a copy of explorer.exe in a safe folder outside of the D:\Windows folder and rename the modified one to explorer1.exe and change the value of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WnidowsNT\CurrentVersion\WinLogon\Shell from explorer.exe to explorer1.exe, which worked for the text change. I was just fooling around, trying to personalize things a little more. I like to mess around! Oh well, live and learn, I'm still gonna try and figure out how to do it and have my search work as well.