Vista indexing help - cannot search in Office apps.

[dkiernan]

Vista RTM build 6000
Outlook 2007 12.0.6023
OneNote 12.0.4518

I am posting here because I think this is a Vista issue, not an Office
issue.

Outlook search does not show proper results. Close/Open Outlook,
reboot does not help. Tools-->Instant Search-->Indexing Status shows
"69,000 items remaining"

Onenote note flag summary page works intermittently. Sometimes shows
correct results (though I am not confident that all results are
shown), sometimes hangs on "Searching..." and never shows any results,
and sometimes repeats the list of items over and over and over.

I've tried:
- Leaving computer on overnight
- Rebuild Index from Control Panel-->Indexing Options
- Start-->Run-->onenote /a (according to MS, supposed to fix
corruption in onenote file)
- excluding Outlook from indexing

The performance of these features seems to be a major step backward
from XP and previous Office versions. What good is combined indexing
when it breaks searching in *every* application?

--David.

 

[BillR [MVP]]

I've seen this happen when an Outlook PST is stored on another drive that
isn't indexed. Is that possibly your problem?
Also check what Outlook folders you are indexing in Indexing Options.

 

[dkiernan]

Thanks for the tips!

This is an .ost in cached mode, with Outlook conencting to an Exchange
2003 SP2 server using RPC over HTTPS. There are no .pst's, though I
do have a couple of POP3 accounts grabbing mail into my Exchange mbx.

Clicking Outlook --> Modify in the Indexing Options takes a
*looooonng* time to do anything (I gave up on it an killed the app
twice before trying to wait it out - over 1 minute). Once it decided
to show me the options, it took an equally long time to expand the
Outlook "tree", my Exchange mailbox and the .pst's are all checked.

I also noticed that C: is *not* checked on the "Indexed Locations"
page.

This is a Core2 duo 1.8GHz machine with 2GB RAM. It should not chug
like this with only Outlook and OnceNote open. I live in those 2
apps, and they are completely broken to me without searching.

Thanks again!

--David

 

[dkiernan]

In the end, it appears to have been the index was FUBAR'd. I did the
rebuild from the control panel and had to wait overnight.

What a joke! You actually have to wait for the index to build to be
able to search through mail? And by "wait", I mean wait 12 hours??
The search function has been slowly crippled since Windows 2000, when
a search for "*.*" actually searched every file, not just the one's MS
thought I meant. Now, it won't search even those unless the index is
happy? This is negative progress.

I understand the premise behind a "centralized search", but at what
cost? At this point, I have no confidence in the search - a feature I
live by in my profession. Did the search *really* find every
occurence?

The index seems to be too fragile for real-world application.

Give me back the Windows 2000 search, please.

--David.