Agent Ransack is the best file searching utility I know of. It’s ultra fast even without annoying indexing, and it has a great UI. However, it has the annoying behavior of following junction points (aka reparse points, links), which can easy triple search times when searching through certain folders on Windows Vista and 7. These versions of Windows have an infinitely-looping junction point in C:\Users. Agent Ransack will search through this entire huge directory tree several times until it hits the NTFS path length limit.
After asking Mythicsoft, I learned about a “secret” setting that allows you to skip junction points. Open Agent Ransack’s configuration file by going to “Run” in the start menu (or press the Windows key + R), and run this:
notepad "%PROGRAMFILES%\Mythicsoft\Agent Ransack\config\config.xml"
In the file that opens, locate this line:
</item><item name="ExcludeSystemHiddenJunctionPoints" tchar="0">AQAAAA==
And change it to this:
</item><item name="ExcludeSystemHiddenJunctionPoints" tchar="0">AAAAAA==
Save the file. That’s it! Agent Ransack will no longer follow junction points.
