I’m using WS 2019 as a cloud server (AWS Lightsail). I have Office 2016 installed with about 15 RDS users. Already tried DISM .../restorehealth and sfc /scannow. Problem occurs with 2 of the 15 users, including the server's admin (and domain admin) account.
Already searched on this and found this: How do I reinstall the Search/Indexing Feature on Server 2012 R2?, but no such luck with simply restarting the search service. Here's how it started and some details of what I've tried so far:
The problem started when 1 of the users was unable to search in Outlook (search failed to locate known existing messages containing the search term). It would also endlessly reindex the same items. After digging further, noticed that C:\Users\AppData\Local\Temp\Outlook Logging was getting flooded with 1-5 file entries (failures)/second! After removing the files manually (over 1 million!) and trying various registry edits (to reset search,etc.), now this user and the server’s admin account both get ‘waiting to receive indexing status’ hang. The other users have no problems with indexing.
I’m guessing the problem got worse (from flooding …\Outlook Logging folder mentioned above) to not even being able to attempt indexing or searching when I tried to manually remove files from %appdata%\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications<SID> folder and restarted the Windows Search service. Even after restoring the files from the recycle bin and restarting the service made no difference (no .edb file ever gets created). Tried adding the role/feature from Server Manager ‘Windows Search Service’ – not sure why it showed feature as available to add when the Windows Search service is running (?!). When that made no difference, I removed it. Also, the event log is full of these entries:
Outlook event id 34 Failed to get the Crawl Scope Manager with error=0x80004002
– event id 35 Failed to determine if the store is in the crawl scope (error=0x80004002).
Search event id 3028 The gatherer object cannot be initialized.
Search event id 3029 The plug-in in cannot be initialized
Search event id 3057 The plug-in manager cannot be initialized.
I supposed I could attempt to recreate the non-admin user's profile, then attempt to recreate the settings (...\appdata..., etc.) and hope to avoid recreating the problem while rebuilding the user profile, but that will be difficult. Also, I have no idea how to safely recreate the server's (and domain admin's) user profile. Indexing on the admin account isn't essential, but it is for the users. Also, I assume that with this bizarre behavior with Windows Search service for 2 users, it will eventually become a problem with all of them unless the cause and/or solution for the problem can be determined.
