Am I missing something, but when in an application, I click Open and get the open file dialog. There is a search box. If I type something in there it doesn't seem to work when I'm opening from a ...

If your Word document is corrupted, it might cause Word to freeze when saving. Use the Open and Repair command in the Open File dialog to try to fix it; alternatively, you can run Word in Safe ...

When your program uses the standard file dialog boxes, whatever shell extensions you have installed get loaded into your process as well.