Classic Shell: Forum

Since yesterday, the search ("Search program and files") stopped working. I do not recall doing anything out of the ordinary.

Basically, what happens is that I start typing, and nothing shows up. Just "Searching...", but it'll stay like that (I left it searching for minutes, it doesn't seem to do anything). Some programs will show up when I fully type out the name, others won't show up at all, no matter what.
For example, until yesterday, I could type in "openc" to have "OpenCanvas" show up, and hit enter to start it. If I try the same now, nothing shows up (just "Searching"), and not even typing out the program name fully will help.

I attached a GIF showing what happens.

Save your settings to XML file and attach it here.

Here you go.

OK. Looks like the search is stuck somewhere. Here's what I need to troubleshoot it:
1) Download the procdump program as shown here: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=6
2) In Notepad type "photo" and copy it to the clipboard
3) From a command prompt, run "procdump -n 10 -s 1 explorer.exe"
4) While procdump is running, open the start menu and quickly paste the text "photo" in the search box
Zip the dumps and attach here.

Sure, here you go.
The forum wouldn't let me attach the files due to their size (maximum 5 MB), so I uploaded them to http://205.185.115.35/explorer-dumps.zip . I think I had the text pasted at the second dump, but the third one should be safe.

It is stuck waiting for the indexing service to respond. Have you tried rebooting? Also, have you tried searching in Explorer?
One more thing to try is to disable the "Search files" option from the Search Box tab in the settings. Then try searching for a program that you know for sure is in your start menu.

Thanks for the hint.

I used the SCM to stop the indexing service, but it would not respond to the stop request - so it seems indeed to be stuck. While waiting for it to stop, I looked through the search filters (with SearchFilterView), but didn't find anything out of the ordinary. I ended up killing the service process, and restarting the service, and now Classic Shell is returning results again.


One thing you could do is adding a "Waiting for Windows Search Service ..." instead of "Searching..." if you don't get any response after a few seconds.
Since it's not your fault, you might as well put the spotlight on the service that's responsible for hanging - plus it'll give a clue to anyone on what's to blame.