Search box on desktop is not working. It won't accept my text input.

Hello Al, and welcome.

You can see if resetting Windows Search using the method in the tutorial below may fix it.

Reset Windows Search in Windows 11 Tutorial | Windows 11 Forum

Hi,

I did check for updates, and it said a security update of some kind was available
But when I tried installing that, it failed and said "error encountered" (0x80070643).

That is most likely KB5034441 - the extremely well-known Recovery partition size/placement problem 1000s have experienced- just search the NET or tenforums to see how widely known that is.

You can hide that update (WUmgr - free - makes that easy to do, or see the relevant Tutorial here) and not see it again- or perhaps just simply make the Recovery partition larger (e.g. 250MB free space). Various threads on tenforums on that.

===================
Search problem
Have you considered using a System Restore point created before this search problem occurred?

Make sure ctfmon.exe is running, for example.

Various posts in this long thread helped some people- there's not necessarily a single solution. Just the right one for your situation.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...1-b9bdc0aa4734

Before spending time on any general Windows repairs, create a new user account for test purposes (and delete it later), log in as that user and see if you have the same issue. If not, then the problem is specific to your account and things like an in-place upgrade repair install won't help.

Please note that there are numerous threads on tenforums where this was reported.
Please search tenforums for such threads, looking for solved examples, if Brink's post above doesn't help.
Some people that removed Cortana experienced this problem. However, Cortana has been retired for a long time, and is not linked to search now.

Example of search results:

Why has the search box on the desktop screen stopped working?

Alas, my crystal ball is down for unforeseen scheduled maintenance.

I've never had this problem- perhaps some 3rd party program or even some action on your part is responsible, e.g. a registry edit, group policy (if using Pro) or 3rd party tweaker.

atmabrahm said:

Why has the search box on the desktop screen stopped working?

I don't know.
At what stage did it stop working?
Does it work for another user account?

Create a Local user account for the test if necessary.
All relevant tutorial links are in my ditty.
Create two spare local, password-protected Admin accounts [post #2] in Windows 10, 11 - TenForums

Does it work in Safe mode?

Boot into Safe Mode - TenForumsTutorials

Does SFC fix the problem?

SFC - TenForumsTutorials

Denis

---

And welcome to TenForums.

It's really worth making time to browse through the Tutorial index - there's a shortcut to it at the top of every page.

- At the foot of the Tutorial index is a shortcut to download it as a spreadsheet.
- I download a new copy each month.
- By downloading it as a spreadsheet I can benefit from Excel's excellent filtering capabilities when I search for topics of interest.

- Tutorials are also listed by category at Tutorials - there's also a shortcut to that at the top of every page.
- Both tutorial lists are searchable.
- You can also search for TenForumsTutorials in many general search engines, such as Google, by adding site:tenforums.com/tutorials after your search term. For example,
taskbar toolbars site:tenforums.com/tutorials

You can search TenForums using the search box in the top-right corner of all TenForums webpages or using Advanced Search - TenForums
- You can also search TenForums threads in many general search engines, such as Google, by adding site:tenforums.com after your search term. For example,
Search for drivers by HardwareID site:tenforums.com
- [This is what the search box in the top-right corner of TenForums webpages does automatically]