If you ever needed to programmatically enable your users to search for files, you certainly found useful the possibility of reusing the system Find dialog integrated in the Start menu and also available through the F3 key within the Explorer. The key to obtain such a dialog is the ShellExecute function:

Declare Function ShellExecute Lib "shell32.dll" Alias "ShellExecuteA" ( ByVal _    hwnd As Long, ByVal lpOperation As String, ByVal lpFile As String, _    ByVal lpParameters As String, _    ByVal lpDirectory As String, ByVal nShowCmd As Long ) As Long

You just have to pass in the name of the directory from which you want the search to start as the lpFile argument. The lpOperation, instead, must be set to the string “find”.

Const SW_SHOW = 5ShellExecute Form1.hwnd, "find", "c:", vbNullString, vbNullString, SW_SHOW

This tip is taken from the book VisualC++ Windows Shell Programming by Dino Esposito.