If you are like me, you do your portal development on Vista or Windows 2008 server. Up until the other day whenever I wanted to have the search (queryd.exe) running, I always had to run it from an administrative command line since the service always failed to start when running under the "Local System" account. So by chance I decided to try assigning a local administator account to the search service and would you believe that the service started? Now I'm not saying that you have to run it under an administrator account, I would probably suggest testing out to see if any lower level permissions...