Open a Search for a Certain Type of File Every Day

I was in the process of converting scattered Microsoft Word .doc files to PDF.  I had found a way to automate the conversion of large numbers of such files, provided I was willing to put them all into a single folder; but that left me with some that would have to be handled on a more piecemeal basis, one folder at a time.

To aid in this process, I wanted my computer to give me a list of where my remaining .doc files were located, so that I could choose the ones that were ripe for conversion.  I had found Everything to be a very useful file finder.  On a one-time basis, I could find my Word docs by just typing *.doc on the Everything search line.  But now I wanted a command-line solution that would run Everything and do that search automatically.

I had not previously tried using Everything with command-line options, but now I found those options in the Everything wiki.  For this purpose, I found that this command would do the trick:

Everything -filename *.doc

That command worked because I had put a copy of Everything.exe (originally named Everything-1.2.1.371.exe) into C:\Windows.  Now, if I wanted that command to run on a regular basis (say, once a day, or once a week), I could add it to a regularly scheduled batch file.  Not that I would have to; I could also just run it from the command line as needed, or save it in a batch file that I would run by double-clicking on it (or on a shortcut to it).

Windows 7: "Access Denied" on the Command Line When Using FIND

I tried to run a FIND command in the CMD (sometimes called the DOS) box in Windows 7.  I got an error message:

Access Denied - D:\FOLDER\SUB FOLDER

This was bizarre.  I had been using the command line in this Win7 installation for months.  Well, something had apparently changed.  I got this message regardless of whether I used my pre-installed "Open Command Window Here" right-click option in Windows Explorer or the Administrator Command Box option I had created in the Start menu.

A search led me through various possible solutions.  I tried especially to tweak the permissions for the entire partition and for the individual folder via right-click > Properties > Security tab > Advanced > Owner tab > Edit > select Administrators and check "Replace owner on subcontainers and objects," and to play with other tabs and settings in that vicinity.

One option I hadn't seen previously was to open the Local Group Policy Editor (Start > Run > gpedit.msc) and go into Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > Security Options > right-click on "User Account Control:  Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode" > Properties > Elevate Without Prompting.  But I already had that selected.

That writeup raised the question, though:  had I not completely disabled User Account Control (UAC)?  As advised, I went into Start > Run > Regedit and navigated to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System.  There, I right-clicked on EnableLUA and verified that the value was zero.  Nonetheless, I exported the tweak, extracted the relevant lines from the REG file, and added them to my Win7RegEdit.reg file for future installations, just to be sure.

When I was in Permissions (via Windows Explorer folder right-click > Properties > Security tab > Edit), I noticed that the permissions checkboxes were checked but greyed out.  I couldn't change them.  Was I somehow not in the right account?  A search led to a proffered batch file (Permissions.zip) that read as follows:

@echo off
title File/Folder Permissions
echo.
echo.             BY KAOS - Windows 7 Forums
echo.
echo.
set /p a=Enter Path Of File/Folder:
echo.
set /p b=User Name:
echo Type "deny" = remove access OR type "grant" = allow full access
set /p c=Permission Type:
echo.
echo.
echo.
if %c%==deny goto lock
if %c%==grant goto unlock
if %a%==menu goto start2
if %b%==menu goto start2
if %c%==menu goto start2
:lock
cacls %a% /e /d %b%
cls
exit
:unlock
cacls %a% /e /g %b%:f
cls

The gist of this batch file seemed to be that I could try a CACLS command of this form:  cacls [folder path] /e /g [username]:f, where /e meant "edit," /g specified the user, and :f gave full control.  So, in my case, what username would I use?  Control Panel > User Accounts said that I had set up my system so that the only options were Ray (Administrator) and Guest (turned off).  Maybe this was the problem:  I had been thinking in terms of the Administrator account rather than the Ray account.  So, OK, I tried typing this on the command line, to grant full control to the whole drive:

cacls D:\ /e /g Ray:f

In response to that command, I got a short message:  "processed dir: D:\.  Did that mean champagne?  I retried the command that had given me the "Access Denied" error.  No, still denied.  Alright, how about same command, different user:  Administrator.  Same output.  Still denied.  Baffling!

I ran across a post that said something about turning off simple file sharing and permissions, and then permissions.  It raised a question:  was there a way to reset permissions to the default, and start over?  For the drive (i.e., right-clicking on D: in Windows Explorer), I went into Share with > Advanced sharing > Sharing tab > Advanced Sharing.  I unclicked Share This Folder > Apply.  I got a note indicating that I had some files currently opened, and they would be closed.  I clicked Yes > OK > Close.  This, in itself, didn't have any effect on another try of the FIND command; still denied. 

I had recently gotten an indication that the Recycle Bin on drive D was corrupted.  I had said go ahead and empty it.  That message had recurred.  I had also been getting bothersome messages when I tried to move or delete folders, telling me that these folders were shared and confirming that I really wanted to do what I had said I wanted to do.  It seemed that these problems might be related.  But how, and what could I do about it?

I found a Windows XP article from 2002 that said, "If you don't have a thorough understanding of the various permissions and their relationships, it can be nearly impossible to sort out a permission problem and find a solution."  So I could see how Windows 7 was a direct descendant from Windows XP:  both could make it impossible to get any work done.  The article said that there was a difference between sharing permissions and NTFS permissions, and that the more restrictive one wins.  So if I wanted to grant full control to everyone for everything, I had to do that in two different right-click > Properties tabs:  the Sharing tab and also the Security tab.  But it really looked like I had done that, over and over again.

Ah, but now I saw a new problem.  In the Security tab, I saw that I had a little red circle with an X in it, next to the Administrator group.  There was no right-click option to explain it.  I guessed that the problem was that I had entered the wrong CACLS command, regarding Administrator rather than Administrators (plural).  So that was interesting.  I clicked on Edit, selected Administrator, and clicked Remove.  Then I re-ran that CACLS command with a reference to Administrators, this time, instead of Administrator.  But still no joy on my FIND command:  Access denied.

So anyway, as I was saying, it did seem that I had given full control to almost everyone listed in the Security tab.  I mean, literally, Everyone:  I had an entry for them, and they had full control, and so did SYSTEM, Ray, and Administrators.  But not Authenticated Users, and not plain old Users.  Who the hell were all these people, anyway, and why did we all need to have so many kinds of access to my computer so that I could get work done?  (Sigh.)  Wiser minds knew; I did not.  Anyway, I went ahead and gave full control to my whole world to everyone and his brother, Users and all.  And still the godforsaken command did not run.

And, by the way, at this point I searched in vain for those greyed-out permissions boxes I had seen earlier.  Evidently I had altered something significant, in all this screwing around.  Not so significant as to actually let me get any work done, but significant certainly in the sense that I could no longer detect greyness when I searched therefor.  Not in the Security, nor back in the Sharing tab.  Speaking of which, I now saw that my reestablished share of drive D now had permissions only for Everyone.  Did Everyone include me and all the other Administrators and Users and Authenticated Users of my home system (I was living alone), or did I need to add the whole gang back to my computer?  Not sure.

It occurred to me that I did have a solution.  It was called System Restore.  But, alas, the mere fact of telling Windows to keep system restores, accompanied by weekly checking to make sure that the task was really running as scheduled, did not necessarily mean that I would actually have recourse to any system restore points, other than the one created that very morning.  Apparently Windows was not content with the 10GB of disk space I had set aside for this purpose.  Fortuitously, I did have an Acronis drive image from a week or so earlier, and so, without further ado, I wiped the drive and restored that.  Did there exist any further difficulty?  Yes, there did.  My Acronis backup was too recent.  Apparently this problem had lurked for days and/or was not only, or primarily, a matter of drive C (stored in Acronis) as distinct from drive D (not backed up in Acronis).

I tried a different command that, I knew, I had run within recent days:  DIR.  It ran.  Now, why would DIR run and FIND not run?  FIND took a look inside files; were my permissions of some type not reaching into the files?  I right-clicked on the files in question.  They didn't have sharing or security options collectively; I had to click them one at a time to get a Security tab.  It said everyone had full control.  The Advanced > Owner tab option said the owner of at least one file was Administrators.  Anyway, the CACLS command was supposed to take care of user accouint issues.

I tried the same FIND command on another computer of virtually identical configuration.  It, too, provided a FIND error.  A search led to a brilliant insight:  my command was wrong.  I was trying to use FIND on a directory, when it only works on files.  I had to make one change:  I had to add a star (asterisk) to the end of my search.  The FIND command worked without error when I did it this way:

find /i /c "X-Message-Delivery:" "D:\Folder\Sub Folder\*"

Solution:  operator error.  Case closed.

Windows 7 File Finder: Review of "Everything"

I had used the pro version of AvaFind in Windows XP for years.  AvaFind was a pop-up file finder.  I would hit Shift-Esc and it would come up and let me search for files; no need to mouse around to start the program from Start Menu or system tray.  It was more intelligent than others that I had used, in terms of flexibility with wildcard searches.  It also allowed me to do file manipulation by right-clicking and choosing Explorer options.  So if I searched for a file and found it in an unexpected place, I could right-click and move it to another folder, or copy or delete it.

In Windows 7, unfortunately, AvaFind kept crashing.  I could not get it to install at all on one computer.  It was past time to find a real replacement.  I had searched previously and had found that Instant File Find functioned as a poor imitation, but after a while I had gone back to trying to keep AvaFind alive.  At this point, however, that had pretty much ceased to be possible.  AvaFind was just not working in Win7.

After another look at a Gizmo webpage reviewing file finders, I decided to try Everything, another file finder that I had often encountered in these searches for an AvaFind substitute.  I downloaded the zip file to get the portable version, which I could then install (and keep backed up) on my customized Start Menu on one computer and have it automatically propagate to the other on my network, thanks to GoodSync.

Part of my reason for choosing Everything was that it did not index file contents.  I had already bought a copy of Copernic Desktop Search and was using that for that purpose.  Content search tended to mean that the program would often if not constantly be searching the contents of files.  Having two separate programs doing that could seriously slow the computer down.  I could have relied on Copernic solely, but its search for file contents (instead of a search solely for file names) made it relatively slow, and buried me in search results that were not what I wanted.  Copernic was 90% satisfactory for my content searching purposes; I just needed a substitute for the filename search capability formerly provided by AvaFind.

After extracting and moving the Everything.exe portable file to my Start Menu, I ran it.  I went into Tools > Options and made several adjustments.  I needed to look up what some of these options meant.  The FAQs were helpful but not very informative.  For instance, they gave me a favorable impression of Everything's extensive search options, but that happened when I was actually trying to understand whether it was possible to set a hotkey to bring up the search dialog.  (No info on the hotkey in the FAQs.)  There did not seem to be a manual.  And who could complain, for a free program -- though it did seem that a wiki might have been a good alternative.  Whatever:  the point is, I had to search around in the forum and, when that yielded too many results, I had to run a more targeted Google search.  Eventually, I found an explanation that got me partway to the answer to my question.  It turned out that, to set the Everything hotkey to be the same as the one that I had used to start AvaFind (i.e., Shift-Esc), I needed to go into Tools > Options > General tab.  There, I set "New window Hotkey modifier" to be Shift, and I set "New window Hotkey key" to be VK_ESCAPE.  I saw that the Escape key would also close the pop-up Everything search window, just like in AvaFind.  So far, so good.

The search results were not perfect.  I searched for HP*manual and got nothing.  I had to change it to HP*manual*.pdf to get the file called "HP Officejet Manual.pdf."  This was odd because a simple search for HP would find the manual, among a million other files.  A search for HP*manual*.* worked too.  Instant File Find had had the same weakness:  with the wildcard, it had to have the extension specified.  I felt, at first, that this flaw would not be major, except in those instances where I would not think to tweak the search in just the right way.  As I continued to use the program, however, I found it increasingly frustrating to be unable to guess how I was supposed to arrange wildcards.  Probably a majority of my first searches produced nothing.  Example:  a search for 2011-03-15*.pdf produced no results, even though the drives being searched contained at least four PDFs beginning with 2011-03-15.  The FAQs seemed to indicate that the asterisk was used both as a wildcard and as a regex indicator that there must be "zero or more" occurrences of the preceding character.  A search of the Everything support forum for "asterisk" yielded nothing.  A search for "wildcard" led to very little:  eight posts, of which five were in a thread titled "Wildcard searches not working."  This thread had some advice.  First, I was to go into Everything > Search > uncheck "Enable Regex."  That made an immediate difference.

Many things about Everything impressed me.  It was a very smooth program.  I wish it would have shown the results of my last search by default when I killed it too soon and then restarted it -- or at least that it would have had a drop-down box remembering what I had searched for.  Somewhere in the process, I came across a reference to another program, UltraFileSearch, that sounded very intriguing, but by that time I really had little hope that I would find a program more like what I wanted than Everything, so I did not investigate it.

Windows 7: More Tweaks & Fixes

I had installed a customized version of Windows 7, and then tweaked it in a variety of ways.  This post describes additional random issues that needed to be fixed.  Some of these issues are described in separate posts:

• Remove the InstallShield Update Manager.
• Eliminate the "You need permission to perform this action" error message.
• Eliminate the option to speed up browsing by disabling add-ons in IE 9.

Verify That You Have Access to That Directory

I was working along, minding my own business, when Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro decided to update itself.  Then it gave me this error message:

Error 1310.  Error writing to file:C:\Config.Msi\c33075c.rbf.
Verify that you have access to that directory.

I clicked Retry.  The message returned.  A search led to a seemingly comprehensive Adobe webpage on the problem.  (The webpage said that products affected included Creative Suite 4.0, which included Acrobat.)  I had to cancel out of the error message and the Acrobat update to proceed with the steps it advised.  I started by trying the option of changing properties on the folder named in the error message:  Windows Explorer > right-click on C:\Config.msi > Properties > Security tab > Advanced > Owner tab > Edit > select Administrators > click box "Replace owner on subcontainer and objects" > OK > OK.  Now the Properties dialog was closed.  That gave it a chance to adjust itself.  Now I went back into the same right-click on C:\Config.msi > Properties > Security tab > Advanced dialog, but this time I went to Permissions tab > Change Permissions > verify Full Control for SYSTEM and also for Administrators > check the two boxes (i.e., "Include inheritable permissions" and "Replace all child object permissions") > Apply.  I saw that I now had two different entries for SYSTEM and Administrators here, so I departed from the official instructions here to remove the ones that did not have Inherited permissions.  I had to remove them one at a time.  The "Replace all child object permissions" box did not stay checked.  I went back into Acrobat.  It started doing the update installation again.  The error recurred.  Going back to that same webpage, I tried the option of renaming C:\Config.msi to C:\Config.msi.old.  The error recurred.  I rebooted; same thing.  But now Acrobat was seeing that it wanted to install an update, so I let it.  Apparently this was different from whatever it had been trying to install before but had failed; this one succeeded.  It required another reboot.  After the reboot, the problem was gone:  I was able to start Acrobat without having it first try to run that failing update.  I wondered if perhaps renaming C:\Config.msi had triggered the update that apparently solved the problem.  A week or two later, unfortunately, I found that Acrobat was still malfunctioning.  I tried a repair and that didn't solve the problem, so I uninstalled it and tried alternatives.

Revise Robocopy

In a previous tweak, I had set up a Robocopy script to mirror my data drive to another internal drive every hour.  Now I wanted to have incremental backups, so that I would back up changed files every hour or two, with a reset every 24 hours.  Ultimately, my solution to this item was to install Backup Maker (see below) and let it do its thing.  I didn't like its nag screen, though, and felt that more work on a Robocopy solution might have been better.

Running AvaFind in Windows 7

I had bought a license for AvaFind, a file finder utility, but I'd had problems trying to use it in Windows 7.  AvaFind had not been updated since version 1.5, back around 2003.  I had tried using it in compatibility mode for Windows XP SP3, but that hadn't worked very well; it was still crashing.  As a temporary workaround, I installed a shortcut to AvaFind in my Start Menu, and just clicked there to restart it whenever it crashed.
Meanwhile, on a second machine, I was getting an error message when I tried to install AvaFind.  The error message was:

Ava Find Internal Error
Ava Find has detected an internal error and must be closed.  Error information was saved to AvaFindErrorData.zip on your desktop.
Ava Find Version:  1.5.218.040106-1058p

The failed installation left an error log file on the desktop.  I unzipped it and found that the log insisted on being printed as a PDF.  The error message inside that PDF was:

[0x0008062e] Win32Exception 0x80070003: SHGetFolderPath[0x18 COMMON_STARTUP] failed. (0x80070003 The system cannot find the path specified.)

I did a search but found nothing.  Another search turned up some results, but then it occurred to me that AvaFind was functioning correctly on another machine, so what would happen if I just copied over its C:\Program Files\AvaFind folder?  I did that and double-clicked on AvaFind.exe.  It ran.  But getting it to function as a registered copy apparently required installation.  I stored a copy of the AvaFind folder in my customized Start Menu, where I kept all my portables, but I also went ahead and installed it.  As time passed, though, AvaFind was still not working well.  Ultimately, I adopted Everything as a good alternative.

Capture Streaming Video

I was once again looking for video capture freeware.  I had previously tried Camstudio, but had audio problems and poor quality, and TipCam, which seemed temperamental.  I found a list of programs and tried several.  Among these, GetASFStream would only work with a URL, which wasn't helpful for my purposes because the video I was trying to download would pop up in a separate window without its own URL.  I had previously found Debut to be excellent, but it had stopped working after a trial period, requiring me to spend $30 to continue.  Not an unreasonable expectation, but I was not doing much video capturing and had just decided to do without, at that price.  aTubeCatcher had some pretty good reviews on CNET, so that was one option.  Other options included StreamTransport (significantly less praised on CNET), Coojah (not listed on CNET), Orbit Grab Pro (a Firefox extension) and Orbit Downloader (heavily downloaded and fairly well liked on CNET), and the RTMPDump command-line option.  I had previously used Orbit; I saw some remarks about bugs on the CNET page; I decided not to start there.  The CNET review said I would need a URL for aTubeCatcher, so I didn't start there either.  There seemed to be another option, involving some technical adjustments.  Before trying it, I wondered whether maybe Debut had changed their licensing policies or had forgotten me -- it had been a year or more since I had last tried them out.  When I closed this post, this was still an area in development on my system.

Internal Incremental Backup

I had previously used a Robocopy script to mirror a hard drive to an internal partition, and had used the built-in Windows 7 Task Scheduler (taskschd.msc) to run it.  There were several things not to like about this arrangement.  First, I had the script running in a batch file, and I couldn't figure out how to teach batch files to run minimized.  So I would be working along, and then suddenly this thing would pop up and start running.  Second, Task Scheduler didn't have an option to run every two or three hours, and that was what I was needed, because otherwise this script was popping up every hour and running for a good chunk of that hour.  I wasn't sure whether it was actually slowing the system down that much; I just didn't want it running that frequently if it was going to be so visible.  Third, my Robocopy settings were doing a mirror, whereas I decided what I really needed was incremental backups, so that I would have multiple copies of files that I was working on, going back in time.  I came to appreciate the value of this once again, as if I had not learned it many times before, when a file I was working on got corrupted and then got backed up, overwriting the last good copy, so I lost several hours' work.

I decided to scrap the Robocopy approach and go with a more traditional backup program.  For right now, I decided to start with the built-in Windows 7 backup program (Control Panel > Backup and Restore).  But it didn't have an hourly option.  I found a webpage that said I could set up an hourly backup by going into Task Scheduler > left pane > Task Scheduler Library > Microsoft > Windows > WindowsBackup.  This didn't give me the options they were seeing, so I assumed I first had to have the built-in Backup and Restore program set up.  So I went back into Control Panel and finished setting up a backup.  But now I wasn't sure if the built-in backup program could do incremental backups.  I found one of the invariably useful Gizmo webpages.  It recommended Backup Maker.  German homepage, but mostly English download page.  Backup Maker was not my ideal, but it worked.

Adobe Acrobat 8:  Comment & Markup Toolbar Reverts to Default

I was using Acrobat 8.2.6 in Windows 7.  I had a problem that I had also encountered when using Acrobat 8 in Windows XP.  The problem was that, when I would start Acrobat, often it would start with what was, I guessed, the default set of tools in the Comment & Markup toolbar.  I would select the tools I wanted, lock the toolbars, shut down Acrobat in an orderly way (i.e., File > Exit), and yet the default set would reappear when I opened certain documents.  It seemed that the desired set of tools had to be set manually for each PDF document -- that those that I had not yet opened in Acrobat 8 would favor the default set of tools until otherwise instructed.

I ran a search and found a thread with a few suggestions.  I tried the one about deleting my preference file.  I wasn't sure where to find that.  As I poked through another search to locate it, I saw that deleting the preference file seemed to be common advice for fixing random problems with Acrobat.  It took yet another search to find a post that seemed to address the topic.  The advice here was that I could automatically delete a preference file in some Adobe products by holding Ctrl-Alt-Shift as the program starts.  Just click the Acrobat icon, he said, and immediately hold those three keys down until the program finished starting.  This did not work for me, regardless of whether I started holding those keys down before or immediately after clicking on the Acrobat icon.

I decided to search for the preferences file and delete it directly.  As advised in one thread, I tried looking for it in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Adobe PDF\Settings.  Unfortunately, I was not able to open that folder.  Attempts to do so gave me an error message:

Location is not available
C:\Documents and Settings is not accessible.
Access is denied.

In Windows Explorer, I right-clicked on the folder and used the nifty "Take Ownership" context menu option that I had previously installed via registry edit.  Now I was able to go in.  I had to repeat that step for the Documents subfolder.  But Adobe was not in there.  I had a general sense that, in Windows 7, the "Documents and Settings" folder was just a placeholder or shortcut to a different folder, but I didn't yet know clearly where that other folder was, and right-clicking on the Documents folder itself gave no clues.  Searches for pref*.dat gave me only Adobe Updater preference files.  It was possible that the problem was due to a flaw in the registry rather than in a preferences file, but I wasn't sure how to find a registry problem either.
At the time when I closed this post, this problem was still unresolved.

Do You Want to Allow This Webpage to Access Your Clipboard?

For some reason, I suddenly started getting this question whenever I tried to copy and paste something in Win7. It may have been the result of an upgrade to Internet Explorer 9. The solution was to go into Control Panel > Internet Options > Security tab > Trusted Sites (green checkmark) > Sites > Add this website to the zone. (This seemed to be the more conservative approach; I guessed that the more adventurous approach would have been to do these same steps under the Internet icon rather than under the Trusted Sites icon, so that they would apply to all websites.) I added the website in question. To do it, I had to unclick the "Require server verification" option. Then I went to Trusted Sites > Custom Level. In the Scripting section, not far from the bottom of the long list of settings, I checked Enable under "Allow Programmatic clipboard access." 

Schedule Defragmenting

I thought I had already taken care of this, but it appeared I had set up automatic defragging for use with a third-party program that I no longer had installed.  Third-party programs may well have been superior for this purpose, but I was OK with just average defragmenting for the time being.  With guidance from a Windows 98 webpage that came up in response to a search, I automated the Win7 defragger by going into Start > Run > taskschd.msc > Action > Create Basic Task.  I went through the wizard to set it up.  When I got to the Action step, I said Start a Program.  The program I wanted was Defrag.exe, and it was to "Start In" the C:\Windows\System32 folder.  In the "Add arguments" space, I typed "/c /u /x" from among the possible options.  At the end, I checked the option to go into the task's properties.  There, under the General tab, I checked "Run with highest privileges" (not the same as high priority) and "Configure for" Windows 7.  Under the Settings tab, in addition to whatever was already checked, I checked "Run task as soon as possible after a scheduled start is missed."

The problem with those settings, as I soon discovered, was with the /c option, which would defrag all volumes, and perhaps also with the /x option, which was much slower than I had expected.  Even though I had this scheduled to run during the night, I would sometimes find that it was continuing on into the daytime.  I had a choice:  set up different defragmenting tasks to run on different nights, or switch to a different defragging program.  Microsoft said IOBit's Smart Defrag was compatible with Windows 7, as it had been with Windows XP, and it still had great ratings on CNET, so I decided to download and use it after all.  I decided not to go with the option of using Security 360, which IOBit offered as another freebie after Smart Defrag installed.  That decision was based on criticisms I saw in several posts I viewed about it.  Anyway, with Smart Defrag installed and configured, I disabled the Defrag.exe scheduled task described in the previous paragraph.

Instant File Find: Acceptable, While We Await a Windows 7 Version of AvaFind

I had installed Windows 7.  I was now seeing that AvaFind was not compatible with it.  It was crashing frequently.  It was time to find a replacement.  This post describes my efforts in that regard.

AvaFind was a fast file finder.  It searched only file names.  To search file contents, I used Copernic.  Ava Find had been remarkably stable.  I would call it up by a Shift-Esc hotkey combination, type in the name of a file (with wildcards, if I wished), and see the results.  Very fast.  If I wanted to delete, move, or otherwise work with those files, no problem:  in the paid version, it could do that.  It would give me an option to open up the Windows Explorer right-click context menu, and anything that I could do in Explorer, I could do with these files that I had just found.  So this was essentially what I wanted to replace.

I spent some time looking over alternatives.  There were not many that seemed to provide these features.  After a number of searches, I came up with a few contenders.  One was Everything, which sounded like a fast file finder, but did not seem to have Explorer file handling features.  Another was Locate32, which sounded about the same.  I put in a request for AvaFind-like features there.  The third contender, and the one I decided to try, was Instant File Find (IFF).  Like AvaFind, it offered free and paid versions; and like AvaFind, its paid version included Windows Explorer actions.  It looked like it actually might be better than AvaFind, insofar as it offered an Advanced Search option.  (Honorable mention to Find and Run Robot (FARR), whose purpose was largely to find and run programs very quickly, without having to mouse around in the Start Menu.)  IFF would cost $29.95 (normally $39.95 - Buy Now!) if I decided to get the paid version.

IFF did its file searching fast enough.  I noticed some features right away.  I liked its less cluttered interface.  I had never known what the AvaFind Scout Bot was.  A useful feature:  IFF had a drop-down box where I could quickly recall and re-run previous searches.  It also would apparently let me save searches, but only in the paid version.  Advanced Search was another paid feature, and so was Search Network Drive and those Windows Explorer features.  The Help File said there was a free 21-day trial period where I could use most features, but apparently that was no longer the case.  I sent them an email (no forum on their website) to ask about that, and also to find out whether there was a hotkey, like AvaFind's Shift-Esc, that I could use to start the program.  It turned out that Shift-Esc was the hotkey, but if AvaFind was loaded first, it would commandeer that hotkey.  In other words, that problem disappeared when I disabled AvaFind.

After a week of using IFF, I felt that I would still have preferred to have a version of AvaFind that would work on Win7.  A minor problem, and possibly not the fault of the programmer, was that I could not persuade the AvaFind window to take any shape other than the original, which was too tight to see long pathnames.  Another drawback, not quite as minor, was that, at least sometimes, it would not search while it was refreshing its index.  Yes, I wanted accurate search results, but sometimes I just wanted to know if a file by a certain name existed somewhere on my drive.  I was more bothered by not being able to set how frequently the program would refresh its index.  Sometimes I would be moving some files around, and I would know I had recently seen one that I was now looking for.  AvaFind would have found it, with its index refreshing every hour, but sometimes IFF did not.  (I could manually refresh the cache, but during that process IFF would not find anythin gat all.)  IFF, unlike AvaFind, did not see my network drives.  One feature that I really missed was AvaFind's ability to rename files that I had found.

I had always been amazed that AvaFind had not taken over the world.  It was a great utility, for those who were running pre-Win7 operating systems.  It was too bad that its developer vanished.  I hoped he was OK, wherever he was.  In the meantime, my tentative decision was to buy IFF.  It was a good product, just not as good as AvaFind.  But perhaps its developer would make it as good as AvaFind, or even better.