SharePoint 2007: Profile import stuck, search crawl stuck & audiences do not compile

If you notice in SharedServices that:

1. the profile import is enumerating the same number (marked in yellow in the image below), the stop import is non responsive.

2. The search is crawlling for too long, gets stuck in the status "stopping" if you try to stop.

3. Your audiences are not compiling, because the import has not finished (mage below).

These are several syntoms that the service "Office SharePoint Server Search" is not working properly.

How to solve this?

1. In Windows, go to Administration Tools > Services

2. STOPthe service "Office SharePoint Server Search".

3. If step 2 fails, open the Windows Task Manager and kill the proccess "mssearch.exe"

4. Perform IISRESET

5. Go to Administration Tools > Services, and START the service "Office SharePoint Server Search".

6. Go to Share Point Central Administration > Shared Services

7. Open the User Profiles and Properties page, and verify if it is importing proper now.

Xtra suggestions:

Reset Search Index:

Now that (hopefully) everything is working fine, we should be concerned about the cause of this issue. Quite likely the search crawll got stuck at some point, and could be the cause for all this trouble. The best is to reset the current Search Index, and rebuilt it.

1. Go to Central Admin > Shared Services > Search Administration

2. Click on "Reset all crawlled content"

3. Go to "Content Sources" start manually a full crawll on the nedded content sources.

Good luck!