Whats happened to my Windows Explorer search?

[stevenrw]

This is an odd one. Win7 Home Premium.
I seem to have lost the facility to search for files in Explorer.
The search box with the little magnifying glass is there top right, as usual, but as soon I type anything the mag glass is replaced by a X and nothing is searched.
Attached screen shots before and after tell the story, in the "after" I have just typed one letter and the glass disappears.
Anybody come across this before?

[zappaDPJ]

Does the start menu search box work or does that fail in the same way?

[Simon]

Mine does the same with the 'x' appearing when you start to type (click it to clear the box), but items do then appear in the search window.

[zappaDPJ]

Yeah, the 'x' is expected behaviour. I think I know what the problem is but I need confirmation that the Start Menu search box is failing in the same way to be sure.

[Technical Ben]

"Expected behaviuor". Yep, it's the usual answer when they make the worse possible decision on GUI. Sometimes also on Linux...

[stevenrw]

Thanks guys for taking the time to assist.
Yep, as you surmised Zappa, start menu search box seems to be ok searching for programs, but not for files. eg, I can start typing "Sp" and Spotify comes up but if I type the name of a Word doc that I know to exist nothing happens. (Although "Search programs & files" is in the box before you type).
In response to Simon's comment, it seems that, for me at least, once that little mag glass icon is replaced by the X then hitting return does nothing.
I may look at other search tools if it proves to be a knotty problem. ComputerActive mag was banging on about another free one which I believe was called Swiftsearch or something like that. They were saying its far better than the Widows search function (even when its working!) and it has the advantage of not requiring indexing which is handy as I've put an SSD in her machine. I may investigate that.

[Ray]

Have you checked in Windows Services that the Windows Search service is actually running? It should be set as shown in this image: -

[zappaDPJ]

Try this. Navigate to c:\Users\your user name\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\1033\. Find the file StructuredQuerySchema.bin and rename it to something else. It doesn't matter what. Restart your PC. I'm fairly confident that should fix it. If it does, I'd advise running chkdsk because you could have some disc corruption.

[stevenrw]

Karma to Ray - thanks - for some reason Windows search was not running. Changed the properties to delayed start and manually started the service and bingo! All is well and (more importantly) HID is happy.
Thanks to everybody (as always) for taking the time to assist.

[Ray]