[Corpora-List] End of sentence search in BNC

[TadPiotr]

Hello, 
My students are trying to look at constructions that occur at the end of a
sentence in BNC, however, we seem to have some problems in searching for
such contexts, using Mark Davies' http://view.byu.edu/ (it is free and
fast...). 
This query

in [pu*]

does produce some results (with a space between the punctuation mark and the
preceding form).

This query

in[pu*]

does not produce anything.

The results of the former are (the first line):

IN . 	9571 

Unfortunately, clicking on the line produces just a response like that:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e31'
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Timeout expired
/x3.asp, line 290 

The simplest question: can't I just use the character itself. i.e. the full
stop?? (I cannot, because this returns no results). 
Using the regular expression syntax, i.e. [.!?] is no good, either.
Can anyone help??
Thank you.
Best regards

Tadeusz Piotrowski