With RC1, you can reinstall as an upgrade, so I went that route. This fixed the start search issue, but also changed some of my settings which I will fix. Thanks for the help and anyone who finds a solution please feel free to post here for others.
I have my vlited copy of Windows 7 RC1 x64 just about the way I want it, but realized a key start menu feature is missing. You can no longer type a few letters and it searches the start menu to find the program that matches. I found out this is linked to Windows Search which I removed in my vlite setup. Is it possible to add this back after an install? I tried to manually install Windows Search 4 (downloaded from MS), but it states it not applicable to my build. Any ideas?