Visual Studio "Find" results in "No files were found to look in. Find stopped progress."

Sometimes while developing in Visual Studio IDE, when you use "Find in Files" dialog to find something, the search fails and you will see the following message in the "Find Results" window.

No files were found to look in. Find stopped progress

Once this message shows up, all the subsequent searches will result in the same message. Nothing fixes the problem including restarting the computer except pressing Ctrl + ScrLk.

What causes Visual Studio to get into this state and is there a setting to permanently prevent it from happening?

Solution 1:

According to this thread:

Posted by Microsoft on 10/13/2009 at 4:33 PM

Hi all,

Thank you for your continued interest in this bug. We have been able to reproduce the issue intermittently in several versions of Visual Studio running on several versions of Windows and have identified the root cause as external to VS. The Windows team unfortunately did not have time to fix this for their current release, but we are working with them to hopefully have this bug fixed for a future version of Windows. At present, the workaround (as many of you noted) is to press Ctrl+Scroll Lock, Ctrl+Break, or the Break key alone.

Again, thanks for all of the details you provided about this bug. If you have any further questions or comments, please feel free to post again here; although this issue was closed quite a while ago, I'll make sure it stays on our radar.

Thanks, Brittany Behrens Program Manager, VS Platform - Editor

This bug has been around since at least 2004 and, as of the above post in 2009, had not been fixed.

Solution 2:

Sometimes Ctrl + Break works, sometimes Alt + Break, sometimes Ctrl + Scroll Lock, and other times Alt + Scroll Lock.

Right now, nothing works. This has been a huge problem for me. Shame on Microsoft for not fixing this bug in the last nine years.

Solution 3:

Apparently, for those for who the key combinations don't work (like me at the moment), deleting the following registry key brings salvation:

MyComputer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\[VS VERSION NUMBER]\Find

Of course, [VS VERSION NUMBER] should be internal version number of the IDE. Don't forget to restart your computer.

Mind you, deleting stuff in the registry is dangerous. Like anyone on SO cares but anyway...