Windows Search 4.0 replaces Explorer File Search dialog. How to get it back?

Question

I'm using the Office 2007 suite including Outlook 2007 too and Outlook is worthless without the Windows Search 4.0

For me an unfortunate side effect is that it also replaced the Explorer File Search dialog. And I don't know what the ratio behind it was, but in this case the Windows Search proofs to be completely, absolute completely, worthless to me. The native dialog has it's gazillion problems too, but at least it finds file without having to have indexes something somewhere before it can search it.

Usually my searches are on remote than local drives, but even on local drives I happen to be out of luck that the things I need to search through are properly indexes.

So: Right-click a folder in Explorer, selecting Search: how can I get the old dialog back?

Note: I'm aware that from within Windows Search I can switch to the old dialog. That's annoying because it is never usable to me, I just want to get rid of that dialog without uninstalling Windows Search because of Outlook 2007 (I can live without Windows Search everywhere I don't need to use Outlook 2007 ...).

Answer 1

Scott Hanselman had the same problem and wrote a blog post about it.

In RegEdit, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Desktop Search\DS and set "ShowStartSearchBand" to 0, and you'll get the default search behavior back.

Answer 2

I know this doesn't directly answer your question, but as an alternative install grepWin. This will add a 'grepWin...' item to the context menu. You can search for text within files (using regex or plain text search) and/or specify patterns to restrict which files to find.