Now you come to mention it, not being the complaining sort, I became accustomed to Ctrl+F not bringing up the Find a l-o-n-g time ago and just adapted to using the mouse to select it instead. Always tedious that way.
EDIT: No, I tested it just now, and Ctrl+F does sometimes display a blank area on the LHS, but it's kind of invisible - you wouldn't know it was there - until you start to type in the search string, which then appears in red in the aforesaid blank area. I can't get the blank area to consistently appear though, even after restarting CHS,so it's not really repeatable. Could be something to do with my system.