One of the most commonly asked for feature are wildcard searches. There is lots of solutions to provide this function in atleast as many different ways. One simple and easy method I have been trying a while in my lab is WildcardSearch from Corey Roth published at CodePlex. The solution work as a dropin replacement of the CoreResultsWebpart and is compatible with almost all aspects of normal search functions in Sharepoint (which most others are not!). The solution just came out in a version 2 which now support Search Scopes. You will find the download here: http://www.codeplex.com/WildcardSearch

There are a couple of cavets and sacrifices you should know about.. http://www.dotnetmafia.com/blogs/dotnettipoftheday/archive/2008/09/18/what-you-give-up-with-full-text-sql-queries-using-wildcard-search.aspx