finder.exe too slow

I am trying to figure out a way to speed up finder.exe on a w2k sp4 server. Indexing services do not appear to help. finder.exe comes with office 2000. I have set it so that users can search one primary folder, which contains 5000 or so subfolders containing 2-5 documents each. If I do a search for *.doc, all files pop up pretty quickly. If I do a search for *.doc that have been created today, I can wait an hour and not get a result. If I do a regular windows search for the same criteria it comes up in seconds. This would give the users too much access to the hard drive though. Any ideas on speeding up finder.exe? THanks!