SharePoint Infrastructure Update Broke my Search... Twice!

Good Evening Ladies and Gentlemen,

It appears that the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Infrastructure Update and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Infrastructure Update, which can be found announced here, has broken my search on two seperate occasions in two different environment, one being a multi server farm (2 web front ends, one application server, seperate SQL), one being a Single Server farm (which hosts SQL) and even a UAT environment which lives on two servers.

The issue I have experienced consistent in all of these cases is that after installing the Infrastructure updates I get this Error:

The start address cannot be crawled.
Access is denied. Check that the Default Content Access Account has access to this content, or add a crawl rule to crawl this content.

This is strange because I did a test crawl before applying the update and it works fine. Checking the crawl logs states that my account domain\sp_content is infact throwing an access denied error. Oh the frustration!

So I did some digging around on the internet and ended up stumbling across this:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861

Basically you have to disable the loopback check, this is done in the registry of your index/ssp server.

Open up RegEdit by clicking Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.

• In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key:
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa


• Right-click Lsa, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.


• Type DisableLoopbackCheck, and then press ENTER.


• Right-click DisableLoopbackCheck, and then click Modify.


• In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.


• Quit Registry Editor, and then restart your computer.

This should now fix your issue!