This is about a free and open source solution to the problem, available at https://github.com/Dijji/FileMeta.
I started out with the same requirements as Pwdr. What the linked solution does is to allow you to use Explorer to see and edit tags, comments, etc that are stored in ADS. It also works with Windows search.
I think that Microsoft almost shipped this in Vista, because all the plug points are there in both Explorer and NTFS. The key piece that I provide is one 17 K DLL ( 64-bit) to connect the dots. They seem to have backed off because although everything works great as long as the file is on an NTFS drive, but the metadata is lost when you send the file as an e-mail attachment, or move it to a different file system. As a mitigation, my solution includes a capability to export the ADS metadata to an XML file, and re-import it elsewhere.