You can control some features and behaviors of Internet Explorer. If you press “F3” key in Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer will show a Search panel to the left of the screen. You can restrict the “F3” button from launching this effect.

Important:
Even if you enable the “F3” keystroke to display the Search panel in Internet Explorer, all the open Internet Explorer windows will not show this panel.

For this, go to Start > Run, enter “regedit” and navigate to the registry path listed below. You can create a DWORD value “NoFindFiles” at HKEY_CURRENT_USER and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE registry paths, if this value does not exist.

Now, right-click and modify the value to “1” which can restrict the launch of Search panel with “F3” keystroke. However, if you want to get back to the original state, change the value to “0”.

Restart Internet Explorer for the changes to take effect.

NOTE:
This feature works on Internet Explorer version 5 and above. Additionally, in case of Windows 98/ME, “F3” keystroke will launch “Find Files” dialog instead of showing the Search panel.