Index Indigestion, and a Hazy Outlook

One of the big reasons I wanted to try using Vista on my desktop was because of the systemwide indexing feature. I'd loved it in beta testing and on my notebook, and now I wanted to actually try using it on my main system.

Today I noticed that despite having everything configured correctly, email in Outlook 2007 was not being indexed at all.  I tried deleting and rebuilding the index several times, even relocating it to another drive (which I had wanted to do anyway for the sake of greater parallelism).  No such luck.

I went digging and found this very curious entry in the system logs:

The content source <mapi://{s-1-5-21-869182674-3149738675-1434642837-1000}/> cannot be accessed.

Context: Windows Application, SystemIndex Catalog

Details: The specified address was excluded from the index. The site path rules may have to be modified to include this address. (0x80040d07)

A Google search turned up little useful information -- only that a number of other people have encountered the same problem in RTM Vista and RTM Office 2007.

Was it a permissions issue?  I know that sometimes I've had problems accessing a file in a drive migrated from another installation of Windows, but the permissions on the .PST file (which was newly created) didn't seem to be amiss.

Was it a service permissions issue?  I tried changing the permissions on the Search service, but that didn't seem to help (in fact, it wouldn't even start when I did that).

I finally did some more digging and tried a few things.  In Outlook, I went to Tools | Trust Center | Add-Ins and checked to make sure the Windows Search Email Indexer plugin for Outlook 2007 was installed correctly.  It seemed to be, but just to be on the safe side I disabled Macro Security and set the option "Apply macro security settings to installed add-ins" to make sure that the plugin itself wasn't being disabled.

I then deleted the entire index, removed all of the indexed locations from it, and rebuilt it so that it was basically an empty index.  Then I re-added Outlook as one of the indexable locations.  Lo and behold, it started to rebuild everything again.

A little more experimentation turned up something interesting.  When I turned Macro Security back on and reloaded Outlook 2007, I got a number of warnings about the add-ins.  One of them was the SearchIndexing plugin.  When I went back to the Trust Center and tried to re-enable it, I found this dialog:

You see that warning "Certificate of signed and load at startup COM Add-in is not in trusted source list"?  That sounds to me like there's a problem with the certificate for the Search Indexing add-on, which wasn't caught before this thing was shipped out -- that or some oddity in my setup caused this problem to arise in the first place.

I turned everything back on as it was before (add-in settings, macro security, etc.), and the indexer still seems to be working correctly whenever new items arrive in Outlook.  So I suspect there was some problem with the way the add-on was being initialized with the system at large as a search extender.

If anyone else has any perspective on this problem, please let me know -- I have the bad feeling I've stumbled across something that has slipped through the cracks.