Disabling Instant Search in Outlook 2007
I know what you are thinking when you read the title of this article… why on earth would you want to disable Instant Search? It's one of the best new features in Outlook 2007! I agree, but if you are having problems with it you might be curious how to effectively disable it.
I personally found this very useful when the Instant Search just completely broke. It returned nothing at all, and I needed to find a message quickly… so I just disabled the index temporarily.
Note: I'm not recommending that you just go and try this. Only use this as a troubleshooting technique, and only if you backup first.
Disable Instant Search
Click the tiny drop-down arrow next to the Instant Search box, and then choose Search Options from the menu.
You'll see a list of your data files or .pst files here, and you'll want to remove the checks next to each one.
When you close the dialog you'll get an extremely wide message telling you that you will need to exit and re-open Outlook.
Now when you restart Outlook, the search will work just like the old versions of Outlook did. That's right, it will be painfully slow.
To reverse these changes you can simply complete the same steps, but make sure to check the boxes. Note that when you re-enable Windows will rebuild the search index again, so it won't be available for a while.


Thank you thank you! I was wondering how to get my search back! My Instant Search has been broken for months… and i'll gladly take the slow search over nothing at all!
Or don't disable anything and just press CTRL+SHIFT+F (or Tools mernu -> Instant Search -> Advanced Find).
You can rebuild the search index through the Control Panel and that also solves the problem of a broken Instant Search in Outlook 2007
Or disable Vista's User Account Control. It works.
Open Start:
Type in search:
C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /k %windir%\System32\reg.exe ADD HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v EnableLUA /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
press Ctrl+Shift+Enter
Reboot.
Just removing the checks for each data file listed under "Search Options", "Indexing Options" appears to have fixed it for me. After restarting Outlook 2007, quick search is still available and working again.
Thanks!