You could disable WinXP from handling ZIP files at all (no "zip folders").
This also gets rid of the big delay that happens when you navigate into a
directory containing lots of zip files with lots of files in them.
You might then want to get some other program for handling zip files, like
Winzip (there are many others, too).
To disable zip folders:
regsvr32 /u %windir%\system32\zipfldr.dll
To re-enable zip folders:
regsvr32 %windir%\system32\zipfldr.dll
Or, instead of using the "cute doggy" search, you could do your search by
doing something like the following in a CMD window:
dir/s/p/b c:\filenametosearchfor
(you can put another path to seach instead of the c:\, and can put wildcards
into the filenametosearchfor)
If you also want to search for things (text) _inside_ of files, you may want
to find a port of the "grep" command that you can run in a command window.
|When I search for a file name in XP, the search looks inside all my
|ZIP files. I search the whole drive for files quite a bit because I
|forget where I put things. The search takes longer to complete with
|the additional time required to open the ZIPs and look inside; it even
|expands the password protected ZIPs.
|