The problem of search and or indexing that is broken on a Sharepoint site running on a Windows 2003 R2 box, had a bazillion different "solutions". I searched everywhere on the net for a way to fix this annoying problem. Nothing seemed to make it work. I finally lucked out (on my n-th attempted of fixing this) and came across this blog entry:

http://mysharepointblog.com/post/2007/01/Windows-SharePoint-Services-%28WSS%29-30-Search-Setup-Notes.aspx

I have no idea why the indexing died in the first place, but since I'm not a huge fan of the product in the first place (I'm a Google Apps fanboy!), I'm just going to notch it down to inherent complexity of Sharepoint and leave it at that! Lucky for my client, they are just using Sharepoint for their intranet and not their main file store!