MOSS 2007 Never Stops Crawling

I have come across the issue where our MOSS test farm never completed its initial crawl.  Whenever a search was done from a MySite, the dreaded, 'No results matching your search were found.'

The initial internet search I did, brought me in the direction of this wonderfully written troubleshooting blog about indexes and maintenance plans conflicting with each other, and locking up the indexes: http://blogs.vertigo.com/personal/michael/Blog/archive/2007/01/23/sharepoint-2007-search-never-stops-crawling.aspx

Our setup already had been configured correctly with the duplicate index allowance.  The solution we had was much more in front of us.

After battling through getting access to the shared services administration - I noted that the number of items crawled was at zero.  Since our setup was still pretty much virgin, with two site collections and a minimal amount of data entry with unique data, I thought the indexing should happen fairly quick…

After a few hours it was apparent something was not correct.  In the Configure Search Settings page, from within managing shared services - The indexing 'full crawl' was still in progress with no items yet in the index.  To resolve this I clicked in to the content sources and crawl schedules, and stopped any currently-running crawls.  Then I went back to Configure Search Settings.  From here I chose the 'Reset all crawled content' option.  Had this been a mature system, I would have had to use this with a bit more caution.

Once the 'Reset all crawled content' command completed, I initiated a new Full Crawl on the Content Sources and crawl schedules page.  Within a few minutes, the crawl had completed with a few thousand indexed items.  Even better, my searches were finally returning items!