I ran into an odd problem the other day that I figured I'd blog for any other poor souls stricken with the same enigma.  Without going into the details of why I was trying to setup the indexing service on my Windows XP SP2 box, I found that when I tried to get into it from MMC (Computer Management), it would give me an error when I tried to expand the Services and Applications node saying that it failed to initialize the snap-in for the indexing service.

Searching on various combinations of the error message really didn't help, on Google or MS.  Everything appeared to be in order (the service acted like it was running) except that it wouldn't run the snap-in, and when I looked at the Windows Components tab in Add/Remove Programs, it showed that Indexing Service was unchecked.  Even if I checked it and clicked next (at which point it'd act like it was installing and configuring it, it would still show up as unchecked.

I had also noticed in recent days that I'd occasionally get one of those application crashed, do you want to debug messages about this SearchFilterHost.exe app.  When I first got the message, nothing came up for it on Google.  When I searched again on Friday, I found a few indicating that it was part of Office 2007 Beta 2, which I've been running since the day it was released, more or less.  I had kind of assumed that, but I just ignored the error and moved on.

Well, those two things gelled in my mind to suggest that maybe it was something with Office 2007 Beta 2 that was hosing up the Indexing Service.  More specifically, I suspected it had to do with the Windows Desktop Search that Outlook and OneNote 2007 prompt you to install.  On this hunch, I uninstalled the desktop search, and voila, my Indexing Service snap-in worked again, as did the program I was running that wanted to use it.

So the moral is that if you're having odd issues with Indexing Service, this is one thing you'll want to try.  It worked for me.  Now, I wish I could run the desktop search to optimize searching in Office.  I logged a bug on the beta site, but I figure my problem is probably just odd enough as to not be reproducible. :)  We'll see...