Hi Michael
Have you got this sorted out yet?
Essentially you need an intermediate table or dictionary which contains a list of fields that can be searched and optionally some sort of security identifier. You mentioned that certain fields contain secure data, so these should be searchable, but only by certain classes of user.
Actually there are two parts to your question:
1) Providing the search user interface
2) Doing it
The answer to the second part depends really on how much access you have to the data or application containing the data. If you wrote it, then you can do much more, but if you are taking on someone else's project, then you won't be able to do things like create new index keys that would help your searches...
I see your original question says that the network in use is Windows 98 - is that really the case?
Regards
Simon