Hi all,

It seems I have a bad luck with Sharepoint Search. I recently installed MOSS 2007 on a machine running Win2003 SP2, SQL 2005 SP2 and VS2005 SP1.

Installation went smooth and everything was ok, until I wanted to play around with MOSS Search.

So I went to Central Administration, Shared Services home page settings and entered the search settings, I started a crawl on the existing content source (Local office sharepoint...), and it gave me three errors, for each start address in the content source (http://servername:portnumber), and the crawl was not successful, here is the error:

The protocol handler cannot be found.Check that the handler has been installed.

I also checked the event viewer, the same warning was given for each start address (event id 2436).

I tried to create a new content source, or even change some settings for the search service, but a strange error appeared after pressing ok (I did not find a match for it on google :( )

The application is unable to accept further updates because the last attempt to persist the state failed

If someone has any tip (other than reinstalling :D ) so that I make search functional kindly share it with me, or lead me to the way for solving this problem.

Thanks in Advance

I had the same problem. I don't know what the root cause was but I was able to fix the problem by creating a new SSP and moving my applications with the search errors into the new SSP. Then I was once again able to crawl the content source and the search functionality was operational with no errors. As a clean-up measure after testing my apps, I deleted the original SSP.

Thanks for your contribution, I wanted to update this post 2 days ago when I did the same steps you mentioned and everything is crawling normally.

Thank you again for your help I really appreciate it.

I just ran into the same thing.

Turns out - at least in my case - the 'Windows SharePoint Search' service wasn't running on anything in my farm.

I had it running on the primary indexing server, and had wanted to move it off to let the primary indexin server have more processing power if needed. So I had stopped it there, and hadn't yet gotten around to starting it up on another server.

Additionally, when I attempted to re-start it on the primary indexing server, using the same settings (database included) that I had used before, it threw an error. I went ahead and setup the service to run on another server, hoping that would clear the error (and show Service running on: OtherServer)

Until I reconfigured the WSS Search service in a fashion that it would run properly again - I kept getting the 'content provide may not be installed' message mentioned earlier, as well as a few other errors.

I rebooted the servers for good measure (It's still all Microsoft...) but didn't have to create a new SSP.