The first time I start the appfinder, it only displays ~5 applications. When I enter a filter, of course nothing is found (because i.e. midori was not among the 5). If I click another category, and then all again, I see the full list as expected. After closing and restarting appfinder, it also works as expected. This happened to me under gentoo and debian.
This might be fixed in beta2/SVN. Can you try to reproduce it again?
Oh, I can reproduce it. Let me fix it.
This should be fixed in revision 28812. Can you verify it? 2008-11-15 Jannis Pohlmann <jannis@xfce.org> * src/xfce-appfinder-window.c (_xfce_appfinder_window_visible_func): Assume "All" category if the category string is empty. For some reason xfconf_g_property_bind() sets the property to an empty string if it does not exist at the time the binding is created. This fixes bug #4613. * NEWS: Update NEWS file.
Definitely fixed in r28867; closing bug. Thanks, Jannis. :)