A while ago I wrote a blog article about Searching file contents under Windows XP. I was wondering why my searches of Visual Studio Project files with the extensions .vsproj, .vsprops and .sln files were coming back with no results. I read my previous article and noticed that it said “Index files with unknown extensions” and these files were known extensions. So this is another candidate for the Switching off Windows XP “features”. There is a Microsoft Knowledge base article about this but both the solutions are inadequate. According to them you have to set a PersistentHandler for each known file extension that you want to search. A bit of playing and I figured out that if you set the PersistentHandler of the extension “*” then it becomes the default searcher. So here is what you do:

1. From the start menu, select Run and type regedit
2. Navigate to: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*
3. Right click on the “*” folder and select New->Key
4. When the folder appears set the name to PersistentHandler.
5. In the right hand pane edit the (Default) data to {5e941d80-bf96-11cd-b579-08002b30bfeb}
6. Click Ok

The GUID {5e941d80-bf96-11cd-b579-08002b30bfeb} points to the Plain Text persistent handler which in turn points to an InproServer32 which contains the query.dll.