[ul][li] Please ask one question per thread.
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[li]a) Flat View may help there, since it will let you include files from child folders.
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[li]b) Are we talking about searching using the Find panel here, or something else? Please start a new thread for that with some more detail on what you want and we can discuss it in depth.
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[li]c) I believe that has been fixed. Or rather worked around; the problem was with incorrectly written shell extensions returning invalid data, which then caused Windows to draw blank icons. Opus now checks and corrects the data before passing it from one thing to the other.
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[li]d) Yes, there are new Find/Search features. See the What's New video around 16:49.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ircl1OVEdaM
No, our own indexing system is not one of the new features. But we still let you use Windows Search (via the search field at the top-right of the lister), if you want to use an indexed search instead of the Find panel.
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[li]e.1) Wildcards like * and ? have always worked, I think. They certainly work now, at least.
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[li]e.2) Things like "NEAR" and "LIKE", no, at least not in the Find panel. (Windows Search has something like that, I think, so you may be able to do it via the search field, top-right of the lister.)
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[li]e.3) "Searching for contents within compressed and zip or rar files etc." That's been possible for as long as I can remember, at least. There's a checkbox in the Find panel which enables it.
It will also search the contents of contents of archives, too. (At least for simple text files in archives. I didn't try anything more complex.)[/li][/ul]