Wednesday 1 October 2008

Vista and Outlook 2007 Search Broken? Search results may be incomplete...

When things are crazy busy, we tend to put up with things until we have the time to fix whatever is nagging at us, or the problem is interfering with our workflow.

Well, this Outlook/Vista problem has been nagging for a while, though not to the point where it was interfering with things ... until yesterday.

Synnex (Search Results)

Search results may be incomplete because items are still being indexed. Click here for more details.

It seems that the search feature was working fine at one point, then it became broken. A direct correlation cannot be pulled as far as the why things broke, but if memory serves correctly, Vista Service Pack 1 was the Anti-Trust modification for the search feature (Ars Technica) may be the culprit.

No matter what, and even on whichever Vista SP1 machine, the same results happened when searching for something in Outlook 2007.

Some Internet searching around did not turn up too much in the way of fixes for the problem. There are a number of somewhat relevant posts on the Vistax64 Forums with no real resolution to the problem.

The solution turned out to be to download the new Windows Search 4.0, install, reboot, and let the indexer run.

After the reboot, and a short time with the system online, the search results were as follows:

Synnex (Search Results)

Your search returned a large number of results. Narrow your search, or click here to view all results.

The time it took to index everything was relatively short.

And, now our searches work.

An update search in the WSUS v3 SP1 console for "Windows Search" or "KB940157" turned up nothing. Not sure why that is as we would like to deploy the update to our Vista installations. For now, we will run the update on all of our own Vista installs and link to it in a broadcast e-mail to our Vista based client users.

Finally, search works! :)

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good work! Though I haven't run into that issue yet, I'm certain that I will and I thank you for that fix.

Since I have a number of clients running Vista, and some running Office 2007 as well, I will have to remember that... Or at least where I found it ;-)

Jack Bender said...

I tried all the windows search fixes and nothing worked for me on that end. Finally last night I had a breakthrough...My OST file in Outlook was corrupted and I had to run the SCANOST.EXE and the SCANPST.EXE utilities and this fixed it for me. I can now search successfully within Outlook.

FYI...After the SCANOST.EXE and the SCANPST.EXE utilities were executed, I rebuilt the indexes just to be safe by going to Control Panel...Indexing Options...Advanced Button...Rebuild Button

Unknown said...

Wow is it really that easy? I've read a lot of complaints because outlook was not indexing mails and all you have to do is installing Windows Search 4.0? But regardless of this problem what about other search tools like lookout or lookeen? I think they are way better than the search integrated in outlook.

Fred said...

I agree to Sirob!!
There are so many search tool for Outlook, which are so great! I worked with Lookout, but then changed to Lookeen!!! Now Lookeen is the one and only search tool for Outlook for me, because compared to Lookout it is developed and supported and the search is so fast, its unbelievable!! With Lookeen you have now problems to work on Vista and Outlook 07, which you had with Lookout!!