The other night, I was trying to explain to a buddy how I had used Spotlight to find the new intro movie in the Setup Assistant. Despite my step-by-step directions, he couldn't replicate what I was seeing. After a while, we gave up for the night. He came back the next day and told me he'd figured it out. After he walked me through the problem, I thought it was worth sharing here as a general heads-up that might catch you by surprise.
To see the issue for yourself, select your Pictures (or any) folder, and then hit Command-F. More than likely, the "bar" portion of the Find window will show Servers, Computer, Home, and (selected) Folder "Pictures." On his machine, though, he was seeing Server, Computers, (selected) Home, and Others. This made it really difficult for him to run a Spotlight search inside the package folder where we were digging -- his machine kept popping back up to his home folder. It's possible to work around this by using the Others button, and then dragging in the folder from the Finder, but that's a major hassle.
So what was the problem and the solution? In his Finder Preferences, he had enabled "Always open folders in a new window." With this setting enabled, when you hit Command-F, a new window opens, since the new Find is now really a folder. And since it's a new folder, it doesn't know anything about its parent, so it shows the default settings, with the highlighted item matching the Finder's settings for "New windows open in." So the fix was to, at least temporarily, disable the "Always open folders in a new window" option. Since most people I've met leave this disabled, you may not ever run into this glitch. I'm not sure it's a bug, but it's certainly not the behavior I was expecting, although it makes logical sense.
Update: This "feature" (and the setting that disables it) only seems to work in column-view windows. After testing based on the comment below, I found that both Icon and List views do not contain the currently selected folder as a Spotlight option. Yet another reason to use Column view, I guess! Can anyone else confirm this?]
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050526070505923