I don't use Windows Search. Aside from the problems you are having,
even when
it "works right" it preoccupies my HD indexing stuff whenever it feels
like it. I use
locate32 freeware and run the indexing manually. Also I turned off as
many scheduled tasks and services as I can find that want to hog the HD.

You might also look at network shadowing. A lot of the time Vista
wants to cache copies of remote files in case you want to work on them
"offline" which may make sense for a work computer on a big Lan but for
my 2 machine network, if I'm "offline" I just boot up the other
machine!!


--
MilesAhead

"How come we don't know the I.Q. of the guy who invented the test?"