On one of my virtual machines, I'm having the exact same problem this guy is having (where, unfortunately, nobody seems to be taking his post at face value):
Starting only recently (unaware of any changes) XP Search immediately responds "Search is Complete - There are no results to display"...
It's not this problem, or this problem, or either of these two. Any ideas? Post a comment if you have any clue. For now I'm sharing the folder set I know the file is in, and searching it from another machine, which works fine. (What's up with that!?)
*** Update (a month and a half later) ***
Found the problem -- a classic "lens cap" mistake on my part (though it does make me think about the UI implications; if I programmed this search dialog, how would I make this more obvious?). Turns out, somehow I had turned off "Search subfolders" in the Advanced Options, rather than setting it like this, which is what I normally have the Advanced Options set to:
This post is getting enough traffic from folks apparently suffering a similar fate, that I thought I'd post the solution today, given that I finally found it on this little VM. Let me know in the comments if it helped you out, OK? : )
YES! It helped. Thank you very much. You saved me a BUNCH of time and frustration.
Posted by: Drew | August 25, 2008 at 03:49 PM
Wish this worked for me. I've been struggling for 2 days with this problem. any other ideas?
Posted by: MO | August 28, 2008 at 04:59 PM
Wish this worked for me. I've been struggling for 2 days with this problem. any other ideas?
Posted by: MO | August 28, 2008 at 04:59 PM
Wish this worked for me. I've been struggling for 2 days with this problem. any other ideas?
Posted by: MO | August 28, 2008 at 05:00 PM
I don't see an item on the menus in Search to find
"advanced options"
Which advanced options are you talking about and how can I find them?
Posted by: Ray Karel | September 26, 2008 at 12:50 AM
Sorry I should also have made clear that the Advanced Options search on my Firefox Browser's main page
does not have the choices you indicated.
Posted by: Ray Karel | September 26, 2008 at 12:55 AM
Sorry.
I found it.
Just scroll down.
Many thanks.
You were quite right.
Somehow it had gotten
unchecked.
Now how to delete my two previous comments?
Ray
Posted by: Ray Karel | September 26, 2008 at 01:13 AM
Thanks for this. I fell foul of exactly the same issue today. Hilariously I've been working with computers for 15 years!
Posted by: Lewis Roberts | October 30, 2008 at 08:11 AM
This might be also relevant if you're getting this over a WAN link:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885843
Posted by: Sandor Teglasy | December 18, 2008 at 01:45 AM
Thanks, I have been having this problem for over a month now.
I knw were all my files are and could get to them but search would not look at tem, thanks!
Posted by: Eric | October 04, 2009 at 06:13 AM
USEFUL
Posted by: BOB | October 27, 2010 at 10:41 PM
Dude! Thank you sooooooooooo much for this posting. I looked at about 10 other sites and tried several other solutions before even noticing I had the sub-folder option turned off. Appreciate it.
Posted by: Bill | October 21, 2011 at 12:46 PM