Issues Searching in Windows XP

Searching and the Search Dialog have certainly gotten worse in Windows lately.

I used to use Search all the time, remember it was Find (using Ctl-F, though F3 still works except in IE). You could select a start point, and easily choose files or folders or specific file types and then ask it to look inside files. Well a lot of that changed in Win2k and then XP.
I hate that it is so hard to specifically search for a folder. When you select file type it takes a long time to load up all the registered file types and then for SOME reason you can't jump to Folder by just hitting F. (Why doesn't it work like other list boxes?) So you have to scroll down, which is very tedious. I thought this might get fixed in XP, but no.

Then with XP they changed content searching, to speed it up apparently, by restricting content search to only registered file types. Now I have found the articles explaining how to fix that or after service pack 1 to set searching inside all files. I will find the urls and post them here.