"No files were found to look in" Error

[Jim Little]

In Visual Studio 2003 I was getting a "No files were found to look in" error
while doing searches that included the entire solution, a file mask of "*.*"
and some text with no special checkboxes checked (such as "Whole Word
Only"). The search constantly displayed the error: "No files were found to
look in" and produced zero results.

I read other posts and no one had any solutions. One post spoke of "scroll
lock" being on, but I think that was nonsense.

In my case I did have to reboot my machine. After the reboot, the searches
worked perfectly. I hope this tip saves others unneeded frustration. I still
do not know what cause the issue to begin with, but it might be related to
the fact that I had been dragging new files into the project that were
located in a directory path that was outside the path occupied by the
existing files in the project. I do not know if this action corrupted some
sort of cache.

Once again, the reboot worked in my case.

Cheers,
Jim