At a former employer I wrote a generic form that will search the recordsource of any form for any data on any field type using access97 and DAO. It included facilities to add a default field to search and ability to exclude certain fields from those that can be searched.
It took about a day and a half including testing and adding All I needed to do to add it to another form was to pass across the form's name as a parameter to the search field.
For something to get Eagleclaw started, I suggest looking at DAO code, loops to obtain details of tables, fields within tables, their data types, forms, controls on forms and reports etc.
John