My system has been having a lot of problems today and, after a good two hours of trouble shooting, I finally narrowed the issue down to the Search Service, which must have gotten damaged or corrupted somehow. Here's the problems.
1. When the search service is running, IE8 and Word 2010 frequently crash either while loading or while running. With the search service disabled, they work fine. It also has a tendency to crash Windows Explorer. Once any of the above crash, they remain inoperable until the computer is restarted.
2. When the search service is running, my computer hangs on shut down and I eventually have to shut it off via the power button. When the search service is disabled, it shuts down normally.
3. The search service cannot be stopped while it's running. Instead the computer needs to be restarted after it's disabled in msconfig
I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate (fully updated) on a Dell Studio XPS laptop and, until last night, everything was working perfectly. Naturally I could just leave search disabled, but I'd rather not as I use it quite a lot. So far I've tried deleting and rebuilding the search index (the rebuild hung on the first file and never made any progress after that) and deleting all the contents of the ProgramData > Microsoft > Search folder (Windows restored the files after a reboot, but the problems remained).
I also tried to roll everything back with system restore but I just get an error saying that system restore failed when trying to restore the registry so no changes were made (this happened on multiple attempts both from Windows proper and from the boot menu).
So, is there any way to repair the Search Service without resorting to a complete repair or reinstall of Windows? Maybe some files I can delete or replace? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
1. When the search service is running, IE8 and Word 2010 frequently crash either while loading or while running. With the search service disabled, they work fine. It also has a tendency to crash Windows Explorer. Once any of the above crash, they remain inoperable until the computer is restarted.
2. When the search service is running, my computer hangs on shut down and I eventually have to shut it off via the power button. When the search service is disabled, it shuts down normally.
3. The search service cannot be stopped while it's running. Instead the computer needs to be restarted after it's disabled in msconfig
I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate (fully updated) on a Dell Studio XPS laptop and, until last night, everything was working perfectly. Naturally I could just leave search disabled, but I'd rather not as I use it quite a lot. So far I've tried deleting and rebuilding the search index (the rebuild hung on the first file and never made any progress after that) and deleting all the contents of the ProgramData > Microsoft > Search folder (Windows restored the files after a reboot, but the problems remained).
I also tried to roll everything back with system restore but I just get an error saying that system restore failed when trying to restore the registry so no changes were made (this happened on multiple attempts both from Windows proper and from the boot menu).
So, is there any way to repair the Search Service without resorting to a complete repair or reinstall of Windows? Maybe some files I can delete or replace? Any help would be greatly appreciated.