[TxMt] "Find in Project..." problem with special characters & regular expressions

[Bryce Thornton]

The "Find in Project..." feature has been acting oddly when searching
for strings with "special" characters in them.  I have the "Regular
Expression" box unchecked and the "Ignore Case" box checked.

I have a project with ~100 files in it.  About 75 of those contain the
variable $ROOT_DIR.  When I do a "Find in Project..." and search for
$ROOT_DIR I get three results back.  I really can't figure out what is
special about the three that are returned.  Is the "$" causing a
problem?  I would think that if you are not using regular expressions
that all special characters would be automatically escaped.

That's my first problem.  Here's the second:

I then tried "*\$ROOT_DIR*" with the regular expression box checked
just to see what would happen.  I realize that this doesn't make much
sense as a regular expression.  I know next to nothing about them. 
TextMate proceeded to give me the spinning beach ball for about five
minutes.  My system became unresponsive.  TextMate eventually bombed. 
I opened TextMate again and repeated the search.  Same results. 
Should there be error checking on the regular expression before it is
executed to prevent things like this?

Bryce