I rarely have a new application where I don't have to tweak my search libraries in some way, shape or form. It's the nature of the beast, IMHO.

My latest "experiment" in searching is to forgo the search button entirely. The user can right-click on the field or form and it will popup a criteria dialog or a list of fields to search on and then the criteria screen. That works OK for single-column searches.

Something else I have found: Users don't give a damn what column or field the data comes from, they just want to search it. I recently had to modify an incremental search form to show SSN, Name, and DOB. In the textbox to enter, I search for the first occurance of the entered data in *any* of the three columns. They like this.

>I have done much the same as you. I have an incremental search textbox that autofills with the first matching record as the user types. I have often included a grid that also moves to the matching record as the user types in their search string. This technique works great with native VFP data.