Visual Studio find doesn't find all possibilities

Yes. "Find Next" is often broken if lots of documents (tabs) are open and you're searching in Current Project or Entire Solution.

Work-around: use "Find All" (Ctrl+Shift+F), that one is reliable across multiple files.

That is indeed very annoying. This happened to me using VS2003, but I upgraded to VS2005 shortly after so I never tried fixing it. I did a search and here are some possibilities to get you started:

• Run devenv /resetsettings
• Window menu-->Select Reset Window Layout (not sure why this would help?)
• Repair VS2008, if that fails try reinstalling.

In my case "Find in Files" function stopped working completely. "Reinstall Windows/Visual Studio!" immediately came to my mind. But there's much simpler solution that worked for me: Spin around on your chair 3 times, clap your hands twice and then press Control + Scroll Lock.

Sources: http://geekswithblogs.net/claraoscura/archive/2008/10/17/125902.aspx http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/edward/archive/2005/01/31/2136.aspx