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 can suffice, but if you are like me and are tired of always having another window running just to have the search functionality on your dev machine, you can give this method a try.