Windows Search Index Problems - with and without Outlook included

Question

I'm having issues with Windows Search and have just about exhausted my troubleshooting skills on this one. I recently was forced to update to Win10 version 1703 by Windows Update, and so after it installed this update for some reason my Windows Search index seemed to have reset itself. However, by the second day, it appeared it hadn't just reset itself, but was entirely broken.

I know that this page (https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Outlook-known-issues-in-the-June-2017-security-updates-3f6dbffd-8505-492d-b19f-b3b89369ed9b) specifically talks about issues with security updates that may have broken Windows Search and the fixes that were rolled-out to address them (KB 4022716), but I can confirm I have KB4022716 installed on this machine and am still having search issues.

The issues appear to be two-fold:

1) Outlook search is not working and never seems to rebuild the index correctly. I'm getting the Event Log warnings mentioned in that link above (under Issue #5) so it seems like it's the same issue, but even with KB4022716 installed the problem hasn't resolved itself (despite numerous index rebuilds I've initiated).

2) Even when I take Outlook search out of the equation (by unchecking it under Windows Indexing Options), the index rebuild never completes otherwise and just gets stuck (at different numbers of items indexing - one time it was around 33,000, and then when I went to rebuild the index again it's now stuck around 13,851 items, etc. - and it just shows that it's continuing to index but never moves beyond a certain number whenever it reaches it and therefore never completes).

Any ideas or suggestions on what I can try to resolve these issues? The search troubleshooter doesn't do anything and finds no issues, so that hasn't helped. Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome at this point!

Just as an aside - I'd like to avoid having to either re-download my entire hosted Exchange mailbox (since I have gSyncit installed to synchronize my calendar and contacts from Exchange to Gmail/Google and not sure what a redownload will do to this synchronization), or even worse re-build my entire PC from scratch. It seems that perhaps I can do the work-around mentioned on this page (https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Outlook-known-issues-in-the-June-2017-security-updates-3f6dbffd-8505-492d-b19f-b3b89369ed9b) under Issue #5 (which I believe has Outlook use it's own built-in search engine instead of the Windows search service), although I have no idea if this will be effective or not. If redownloading the hosted Exchange mailbox is the only way to fix my issue #1 above then I'll obviously try it, although I'd really like to not have to rebuild my entire PC just to fix these search issues.

Thanks to any and all that can offer some advice or assistance!

Answer 1

Try to remove this KB and reinstall it. Besides, make sure you have all the released updates installed. Then rebuild the index and check again. In some scenarios I noticed, it did work.

Besides, you can try the workaround, but it would be slow if you have large mailbox. So try to reinstall the fix first.