An old bug seems to have resurfaced in the current build of Office 2010 Beta. Normally, you should be able to use Windows Desktop Search to return search results from your OneNote notebooks. But on 64-bit versions of Windows, while the search results show up, they have generic Explorer icons and clicking on them doesn’t do anything. The problem is that the system isn’t seeing the right version of the OneNote Search Connector DLL. If you’re seeing this problem, read on to find out how to get your searches working properly on Windows x64.

Note: This fix involves changing the Registry. If you’re not comfortable with that, you may have to just put up with wonky search results. As always, you should backup your Registry before making any changes, and I take no responsibility for any damage these instructions may cause.

I should also mention that I’m doing this on Windows 7 Ultimate x64. Other versions might require a different fix.

As I said, the problem is that the OneNote Search Connector DLL isn’t registered properly. On Windows x64, Explorer needs to know to look for the 64-bit version of the DLL, found in the “Program Files” folder (not “Program Files (x86)”). On my machine, the appropriate keys were simply missing from the Registry. These are the keys you’ll need to create:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{0875DCB6-C686-4243-9432-ADCCF0B9F2D7}]
@="Microsoft OneNote Namespace Extension for Windows Desktop Search"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{0875DCB6-C686-4243-9432-ADCCF0B9F2D7}\InprocServer32]
@="C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\Office14\\ONFILTER.DLL"
"ThreadingModel"="Both"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{0875DCB6-C686-4243-9432-ADCCF0B9F2D7}\ProgID]
@="OneIndex.ShellFolder.1"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{0875DCB6-C686-4243-9432-ADCCF0B9F2D7}\ShellFolder]
"Attributes"=dword:20180000
"WANTSFORPARSING"=""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{0875DCB6-C686-4243-9432-ADCCF0B9F2D7}\VersionIndependentProgID]
@="OneIndex.ShellFolder"

To make your life easier, you can download the appropriate registry file here. Just save the file to your desktop and double-click it to create the appropriate Registry keys.

Note: If your copy of Office 2010 Beta is installed on a drive other than C:, you’ll need to edit the Registry file to reference the correct drive before it will work.

Once you create the Registry keys, clicking on OneNote search results should take you to the appropriate page in OneNote. You should not need to reboot or rebuild your search index.

On my machine, however, there was one more problem. The “heading” under which the search results appeared in the Start menu was still labeled with a long, meaningless codename, prefixed with “oneindex14–”. It turns out the fix for this is easy, too.

Just open the start menu, type “%UserProfile%/Searches” and hit Return. In this folder, you should see a couple of items under the heading “Search Connector.” Find the one that’s named after the weird code, and simply rename it to “Microsoft OneNote,” like you would rename any other file. Your OneNote search results should now appear in the Start menu under that name.

Thanks to John Guin at the OneNote Testing team at Microsoft, whose original blog post about Office 2007 led me to cook up this solution.

This entry was posted by Neil McAllister on Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 6:47 pm and is filed under Hacks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.