Well I got it working by uninstalling, turning off UAC, reinstalling.

I hate to say it but that's just very poor quality control on their part.  UAC in Vista has been around for 3 years now.  This should not be a problem for application vendors.

For the record, my first install had UAC on and I chose to install it using the "for best backwords compatibility" option where it installs the runtime in a Poser directory on the c: drive vs. having the content installed on the shared User drive.  The shared User drive was the default recommended option for users with Vista and UAC on. 

The bottomline is Smith Micro should have been aware that the "backwords compatibility" install option will disable the search feature if you have UAC on in Vista when installing the application.

Now that Poser 8 is installed and the search feature does work as advertised, I turned UAC back on and everything seems to work ok.

Allan