This valuable info was found on Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen.

Change the following:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Desktop Search\DS
and set “ShowStartSearchBand” to 0, to get the default search behavior back.

While you’re at it you might as well go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex
and set FilterFilesWithUnknownExtensions to DWORD with the value of “1” in order to enable full-text searching of files (like code!) that Explorer by default skips over.

Thanks Scott Hanselman. This was a great help.