Microsoft, why do you vex me so?

[williamjm]

I encountered an odd computer problem at work today. I was using Microsoft Visual Studio to do some coding and hit the 'find in files' button as I tend to do several times a day. This time it did something it hadn't done before and said "No files were found to look in.Find was stopped in progress." I double-checked that it was trying to search in the correct directory for the appropriate type of file, it seem OK and I couldn't see why it was failing to find any of the thousands of files that were in the directories. As an experiment I tried randomly changing options and searching in different directories for all *.* files, but got the same response.

The obvious first step in trying to figure it out was to type the error message into Google. The first hit was for Microsoft's Knowledge Base system which suggested that the only reason for such an error would be searching in an empty directory of for the wrong type of file, because naturally it couldn't indicate a Microsoft bug but had to be due to their users being idiots. It being about 5pm on a Friday afternoon at the end of a long week it was quite possible I was being an idiot so I went back and checked again that I was trying to do the correct thing.

The second hit on Google was to someone's blog who pointed out that to fix this problem you had to either completely reinstall Visual Studio or you could just hit the "Ctrl" and "Scroll Lock" keys together and the problem would magically fix itself. I tried the second solution, and it worked immediately. I can't think why I didn't think of doing that myself . I knew the Scroll Lock must have a purpose someday, who knew that's what it did?

In summary: Google 1, Microsoft 0

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