"No files were found to look in.Find was stopped in progress." in VS 2003

Published Mon, Jan 31 2005 9:50 PM

To find my way around in someone else's sources the Find Files functionality is an essential facility in Visual Studio. Especially since it does not have conditional breaking like Visual Studio 6 has. (I refuse to get over that.) Imagine my almost hurtful eyebrow frowning when Find Files suddenly stopped working at a fixed time project.
 
I still don't know why it happened but with every Find attempt the result box immediately showed the message "No files were found to look in.Find was stopped in progress." Ever experienced this oddity?
On the internet I found posts stating even reinstalling Visual Studio didn't fix this. It took me a while to find the solution to it (a few months ago). Via another reference I found the solution on gotdotnet.com.
Because a solution to this problem deserves more attention I'm making a link to it here: http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/MessageBoard/Thread.aspx?id=217037&Page=1#218705
 
It also deserves a nomination in the problem solving category Spin around on your chair 3 times, clap your hands twice and then press... because the solution is to press Control + Scroll Lock and all is fixed.
Maybe it's a easter egg gone bad...

by Edward van Steenderen

Comments

# Edward van Steenderen said on Thursday, February 10, 2005 4:20 PM

Thanks, I had exactly the same problem right now.

# Edward van Steenderen said on Monday, March 14, 2005 12:54 PM

Shazbot.

This just happened to me while working on an ASP.Net project. Losing the Find in Files is crippling! Many thanks.

# Edward van Steenderen said on Tuesday, March 29, 2005 10:13 PM

Thanks for this posting. Helped a lot and saved lot of frustration which just started to build up :)

# Edward van Steenderen said on Monday, April 11, 2005 5:34 PM

I've found that if the "Look in:" folder specified has the system attribute, Find in Files always returns immediately with "no files were found to look in".

Also, It might be interesting to note that on my system the Ctrl+ScrlLk solution consistently toggled between the "VS Lockup" problem and the "no files were found to look in" problem (if the folder has the system attribute).

# TrackBack said on Thursday, June 16, 2005 7:17 AM

# Edward van Steenderen said on Friday, July 01, 2005 3:53 PM

Thanks a bunch. I used to reboot my system to solve this, happening from time to time and driving me mad.

# Primate Labs Blog : Find in Files said on Thursday, June 14, 2007 2:33 AM

Pingback from Primate Labs Blog : Find in Files

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