I have a large number of messages in my inbox. Some were imported from
previous XP version on another machine. Now running Vista and Office Outlook
2007. Outlook search function has just ceased to do what it should. It only
searches and returns results from a very small number of messages in the
Inbox (like about the last week or so), instead of the whole lot. This is
very annoying as I can no longer easily find old emails with forgotten
passwords, etc when I need them without manually scrolling through hundreds
of emails.

I remember a similar bug happening in a previous incarnation of Windows
(98?), and it had something to do with Outlook not really deleting deleted
and archived messages from the inbox file, but just pretending it had, and I
had to open it in a word processor and edit the file to get it to work. Is
this the same bug re-appearing?