Visual Studio “Find” results in “No files were fou

Question

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?

Answer 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.

Answer 2

I have found another cause of this: Moving the solution folder to a new location, when CMake is part of the build process.

I was working with the Chromium Embedded Framework and moved the main CEF folder from e:\ to c:\ . This seems to break everything including Find because the CMake build scripts it uses hard-code the disk volume and full path (E:\folder) into the source paths.

Answer 3

There are currently nine bugs on the Connect site related to this and marked as Not reproducible.

I created another one for Visual Studio 2010 SP1: "Find was stopped in progress" while performing search in Visual Studio

Please vote for it if you are unable to perform search.

PS: Microsoft claims that they fixed it in Visual Studio 2012.

Answer 4

I don't think there is anything you can do to prevent it. It seems to occur after I have stopped a build with CTRL+Break...Maybe I am pressing CTRL+Scroll Lock during that time???

I have only had it happen to me 2-3 times, and that was several months apart.

What he is saying is that occasionally when performing a search within Visual Studio you get the mentioned error message. Even though you know there is stuff to find. It is some weird state that Visual Studio gets into. If you press the (CTRL+Scroll Lock) it will 'fix' the issue.

Answer 5

My experience with this problem:

Steps to Reproduce

I just experienced this using Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard and Visual Studio 2010 SP1.

I was accessing Visual Studio remotely through Citrix Receiver (from my computer, A, to B) and through Windows Remote Desktop (from B to C). In this set-up (chaining two remote sessions), I sometimes have stuck modifier keys.

In B, I had pressed Windows+Pause to access the System Properties window. (This may or may not be related; I suspect there could have been a stuck key press or something.)

Later on, when I opened Visual Studio on C, I had this problem. Note that I always use Ctrl+Shift+F to access the Find All window.

Solution

I solved it by pressing Ctrl+Scroll Lock as suggested in other answers.

Cause

As for why this happens, I did notice that if I press Ctrl+Break while the text cursor is in the Find Results window but before any results are found then the search stops with the same message. This indicates to me that it's related to a keyboard problem.

As reported by others, apparently it's a Windows bug. Here's a discussion about this.

Answer 6

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.