One of our clients requested our assistance after MOSS a infrastructure update failed. As a result, our client’s intranet site collection had now completely lost both its search box and the Search Center site was now hidden. Although it was possible to navigate to the Search Center site through the “View All Site Content” link, an error occurred when displaying search results. Of course, the error was a standard SharePoint error message that didn’t explain what was really happening. In addition, the Farm’s Search Settings page in the Central Administration SSP also threw an “Unexpected Error”.
After changing the appropriate web.config files to reveal more information and recreating the errors it became clear what the errors were:
On the search results page the error was System.IndexOutOfRangeException: DisplayInAdminUI.
On the search settings the error was ‘S2LeftNav_Administration’ was not found.
After searching around it became apparent that the issue would either be resolved by re-running the SharePoint Configuration Wizard or by recreating the SSP.
I didn’t want to do the second so I gave the first a try and this *did* correct both errors.