I don't think there is anything you can do to prevent it.
It seems to occur after I have stopped a build with CTRL+Break...Maybe I am pressing CTRL+Scroll Lock during that time???
I have only had it happen to me 2-3 times, and that was several months apart.
What he is saying is that occasionally when performing a search within Visual Studio you get the mentioned error message. Even though you know there is stuff to find. It is some weird state that Visual Studio gets into. If you press the (CTRL+Scroll Lock) it will 'fix' the issue.
Thank you for your continued interest
in this bug. We have been able to
reproduce the issue intermittently in
several versions of Visual Studio
running on several versions of Windows
and have identified the root cause as
external to VS. The Windows team
unfortunately did not have time to fix
this for their current release, but we
are working with them to hopefully
have this bug fixed for a future
version of Windows. At present, the
workaround (as many of you noted) is
to press Ctrl+Scroll Lock, Ctrl+Break,
or the Break key alone.
Again, thanks for all of the details
you provided about this bug. If you
have any further questions or
comments, please feel free to post
again here; although this issue was
closed quite a while ago, I'll make
sure it stays on our radar.
Thanks, Brittany Behrens Program
Manager, VS Platform - Editor
This bug has been around since at least 2004 and, as of the above post in 2009, had not been fixed.
You should try clicking inside the Find Results window, and once the blinking text cursor is visible, hit Ctrl + Break four or five times. That should do the trick.
I just experienced this using Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard and Visual Studio 2010 SP1.
I was accessing Visual Studio remotely through Citrix Receiver (from my computer, A, to B) and through Windows Remote Desktop (from B to C). In this set-up (chaining two remote sessions), I sometimes have stuck modifier keys.
In B, I had pressed Windows+Pause to access the System Properties window. (This may or may not be related; I suspect there could have been a stuck key press or something.)
Later on, when I opened Visual Studio on C, I had this problem. Note that I always use Ctrl+Shift+F to access the Find All window.
Solution
I solved it by pressing Ctrl+Scroll Lock as suggested in other answers.
Cause
As for why this happens, I did notice that if I press Ctrl+Break while the text cursor is in the Find Results window but before any results are found then the search stops with the same message. This indicates to me that it's related to a keyboard problem.
I thought I was seeing this problem, but after two days of searching for a solution I figured out that the "Look at these file types" selector had changed and didn't include the file extension I needed.
I encountered a very similar problem. I was searching a folder for all files for a phrase in all .cs files in my solution. Visual Studio kept saying "No files were found to look in". (It did not have the "Find stopped progress" part of the message.)
I searched for the message and found this question. The suggested keyboard commands in other answers did not work.
I like to use the keyboard for navigation. I had accidentally hit Alt+B and Space. Alt+B is the shortcut to jump to the "Include sub-folders" checkbox on the Find and Replace form. The space bar cleared the checkbox, and then Alt+A performed a Find All action. Because it was not searching sub-folders, no files were found. The message was correct.
After checking the "Include sub-folders" box, searches found the matching files in sub-folders. So if you're getting the message "No files were found to look in" without the message "Find stopped progress", ensure the search is looking in sub-folders!
I have found another cause of this: Moving the solution folder to a new location, when CMake is part of the build process.
I was working with the Chromium Embedded Framework and moved the main CEF folder from e:\ to c:\ . This seems to break everything including Find because the CMake build scripts it uses hard-code the disk volume and full path (E:\folder) into the source paths.