Windows 7 search for files with special characters in name

Question

I have a rather large source code repository on my machine; it is not indexed by Windows Search. I am trying to find some oddly-named generated files of the form .#name.extension.version where name and extension are normal names and extensions and version is a numeric value (e.g. something like 1.186). On Windows XP I could find these files by searching for .#*; on Windows 7 that just returns every single file and directory. So my question is this: is it possible to find files named like that using the built-in Windows 7 search functionality?

I did find this question which is very similar, but the answer doesn't work for me; it seems like any special character I put in the query is either ignored or treated as a wildcard, and as a result it matches every single file and directory.

Is there perhaps some registry value I can set to make the search-by-filename feature work with special characters?

Answer 1

Doh, I stumbled upon the answer after consulting the Advanced Query Syntax reference again. Searching for filename:.#* gives me the XP search behavior.

Answer 2

I found this: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-files/how-to-search-for-special-characters-in-explorer/8e223aef-3240-4a16-aa79-e9562f97858f?auth=1

This makes me think that the star character ("*") is the escape character for special characters in Windows Advanced Query Syntax and that it comes BEFORE the special character.

I tried it and found that #* doesn't work but that *# DOES work. I think the other answerer might have gotten this backwards.