Limited to 10,000 Results in "Find Users, Contacts, and Groups"

When you use the "Find Users, Contacts, and Groups" tool in the Active Directory Users and Computers MMC snap-in, you are limited to 10,000 or less search results.

This issue occurs to help speed the search process by limiting the number of search results returned.

To resolve this issue, you can increase this limit on your Windows 2000 domain controller:

1. Click Start, point to Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Active Directory Users And Computers.
2. Right-click the domain object, click Find, and then click the Advanced tab. The number of results returned is not limited to 10,000.

This behavior is by design.

Querying for large numbers of records takes time by consuming Domain Controller resources and is network bandwidth intensive. Also, objects are not returned lexigraphgically in the order that they are sorted in. The first object queried may be the last object returned. The object picker uses a second thread to perform the query while you work with the user interface, so starting it causes this resource consumption until the object limit is reached or no more items match the query. Because the object picker does a prefix search on anything you enter, there is no need to wait for the browser to fully populate if you know at least a few characters at the start of the name or names you are looking for.