You ever do 2 things and then wonder which one actually fixed the issue? Yeah, me too. So here’s what happened: We have a number of site collections on an old WSS 3.0 farm that are not returning search results (more on that later). Microsoft wanted us to turn on verbose logging during a crawl to see what was happening.
To make a long story even longer, the ULS logs were getting generated but were empty. 0 KB. Damn.
Everything revolves around the Windows SharePoint Services Tracing service. That’s the timer job that runs all the logging. This should be running under Local Service. Check. So maybe the farm account can’t write to the log files? Worth a try so I added the farm account to the local group Performance Log Users. Just for drill, I restarted the Windows SharePoint Services Tracing service.
Bingo! Everything worked! Logs are filling up again. So which one fixed it? Who knows? But it works so do both.
The Grumpy Guru 