This makes sense because it did this recursive find on 2 of my dirs out of 5. When I checked them, none contained the exe I told it to find so it went ahead and continued downwards in the tree. I could not understand why is it behaving differently across dirs. For now, I wanted it to be a greedy as possible by adding \*\ and it works consistently now.

One last question, though, adding '\*\' to my search template now will make these 2 search strings return same results...

lab\exe
+lab exe +sall

The template simply and implicitly did the '+sall' for me. Right?

this should be similar to having an folder alias 'pf' and then typing '+pf \\ microsoft'
right?

I've experienced FARR hanging when it was searching in places that contained links to network resources or UNC paths. Mouser is aware of it and I think he's getting it fixed. But to diagnose your issues, turn on the status bar and see at what folder or place it is hanging. See if it happens on same place and dig into it to find out if you have any links to network shares.