Disclaimer: This is more of an ugly hack than a tip, and not even the type that would be cool enough to make it into Visual Studio Hacks, but here goes... When you search the MSDN local help it has a nasty behavior of making all your search terms indelibly highlighted with no obvious way to turn off the highlighting. 

I recently observed a great way to avoid the cognitive pain of barbed keyword highlighting pricking at your brain every other word:

  • Copy the local help URL to the clipboard
  • Paste it back into the URL field
  • Hit enter

This effectively reloads the search page and the keyword highlighting will not persist.  Voila.