Clicking "Project search" in toolbar prompts "PDF Loader" error message

Apologies if this duplicates an earlier post, but a quick search didn’t show anything.

For Scrivener 3.0.1.0: When I click the magnifying-glass icon for Project Search, it throws up a little error message: “PDF Loader: Could not load PDF file for printing.”

It takes 4 or 5 clicks on “OK” to finally clear the message, and then Scrivener hangs for a few seconds. Then one more error message, and when that clears…finally the Project search bar opens at the top of the binder.

From there, the search bar will stay for my whole work session. But every time I reopen Scrivener, I have to go through this routine to get the search bar to appear.

The assigned keyboard shortcuts for Project search (Ctrl + G, Ctrl + S) don’t seem to do anything.

If I start with a simple text search (Ctrl + win + G) and then select Project search from there, the same thing happens with the error message(s).

I really would like to keep the Project search bar open all the time (as it was in Scriv 1, over on the right side of the toolbar), but I don’t see where to set that in Options?

Many thanks.

There is indeed another open discussion on this. I’ll go ahead and close this one to avoid the conversation getting forked.