The search function can take a long time - long enough for your browser to time out. (It's not the browser; I'm using IE6 also.)
Perhaps you are not narrowing your search enough. It helps to narrow your search by searching titles rather than the entire contents of the topics; limiting the time frame; limiting the search to a specific user name; limiting the search to one forum rather than all open forums; etc.
I did a search for all topics in the General Discussion forum with "decal" in the title. It came up pretty quick, but none of the three topics were relevant. So you might want to search for "tail" in the title, that kind of thing. Also try the Technical forum.
First thing, obviously, is to make sure the search function works for you. I suspect if you try a reasonably narrow search you'll find that it works fine. If not, let us know what it's doing and we'll go from there.