slowbleed,
I have also wondered about this weird behavior with Mousepad, especially since Mousepad is the default text editor in Phoenix 2009.4, which I run on one of my laptops.
I have to restart Mousepad in order to get Find to work again. The unfortunate side effect is that it severely slows down my work flow, to have to shut down Mousepad, restart it, then reload the document I was working on.
parnote