hi DayDreamer ;-)
A complete search lasts around 1 minute (just tested on ProbenPrinz.de server), definitely _not_ 4 hours...
What may be happening is that the search results window's contents are blinking too fast (the contents blink when new results are found) so you can't see them untill the search ends (wait a minute with patience in that case).
It may also happen that no results are found untill the very end of the search.
There's no way to speed a search up because it depends on the server you are connected to sending the information.
As a test, search for "amule" (that's what I've just done to test) and it should show lots of results in very few seconds (here it lasts less than a second to show first results).
Greetings!
