Windows Search on W520 - Keeps Getting Disabled

[mdjtlj]

Greetings,

I've had this continaul problem with my W520, which I can't seem to solve.  First off, I realize that this is a Lenovo forum, but I find the MS forums too hard to follow and the advice is not as good. 

Anyway, here is the situation.  Windows Search is disabled, I go into services, set it back to Automatic and start the service.  It works fine all day long, no problems.  When I shut off the machine, sometimes, not everytime, when I bring the machine back up, the service is now disabled and I go through this entire process again.  What is strange is that at other times, after reboot, it is still enabled.  

I've checked the event log, there is only an entry that indicates that the service was disabled, but there is no information in there which indicates the process that did the disable. 

Here are the specs of the machine which might be relevant: 

Hardware

W520

x64 Win7 Ultimate - standard Windows build

2820QM processor

16 GB RAM

1x500 GB drive in the HDD bay

1x750 GB drive in the Ultrabay (with the annoying gap)

Software

MS Office 2010

Visual Studio 2008/2010

SQL Server 2005/2008

ESET NOD32

Quickbooks

Chrome

othr related items for development.....

On the software side, I tend to keep it light, thus making it quicker and less likely to have conflicts.  

Is there any tool out there which can tell me what process keeps diabling this service?  It is very frustrating, having to go through this all the time.  I know there will be some that say it slows down your machine, that may be their experience, but it is not mine and that penalty is outweighed by the convenience of being able to quickly search a 6GB email account.  

Many thanks in advance. 

[ColonelONeill]

Could it be an occasional failed startup causing Windows to revert to a previously known good configuration where the service is disabled?

[mdjtlj]

I don't believe so.  Take for example the following scenario from yesterday/today: 

- Took machine home from work and set up at the home office.  Had to enable and restart the service.  After this was done, all was fine. 

- Shut down the machine this morning before going to work, it was a normal shutdown

- After restart at work, noticed that the service was not started and was disabled, which is contrary to the state it was shut down in, so went in and enabled and started

If I go look at the event log, I see that it was disabled, but no indication of which process actually disabled the service.  What is interesting to note is that the disabling occured during the shutdown process, based upon the recorded time of the event in the log.  

What is even more frustrating is that in the above scenario, there are times when it doesn't get disabled and all is well, albeit there is no pattern to this.  I will say that more often than not, the service is disabled.  

[topmahof Community Moderator]

Hi mdjtlj,

Just a couple of things to check.

Control panel, default programs, set your default programs, make sure windows search explorer has all its defaults.

Also under default programs, Associate file type or protocol with a program, scroll down to bottom, 

search        windows search protocol      windows explorer

Dave

[Vermyndax]

Exact same problem on my W520 here - and it's driving me bananas.

[Vermyndax · Accepted solution]

Through the use of Windows object auditing I discovered the problem. I audited registry access and discovered there are numerous regular attempts to look at the registry key:

\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\services\WSearch

After rebooting, I noticed that a Lenovo process makes a key change to the startup type and sets it to disabled. The executable belongs to the RapidBoot package:

Object:
Object Server: Security
Object Type: Key
Object Name: \REGISTRY\MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\services\WSearch
Handle ID: 0xc0

Process Information:
Process ID: 0x1fe4
Process Name: C:\Program Files\Lenovo\RapidBoot\HyperW7Svc64.exe

Access Request Information:
Accesses: Query key value

Access Mask: 0x1

I uninstalled RapidBoot, rebooted and voila, the problem went away.

Related: I had RapidBoot v1.0 installed. There have apparently been two more updates to this package since then with the last update occurring on 10/30/11. Unfortunately, the Lenovo updater does not catch this package update on my system. For now I've just uninstalled the thing and will go on without it since it kills a service that I like to use on every reboot.

[mdjtlj]

Thank Vermyndax, this is a nasty little feature of RapidBoot that I did not know about.  In fact, I just put in a mSATA drive and rebuilt Win7 x64 Ultimate from the ground up this past week and was disappointed to find out that this was still happening after a fresh build. 

When I installed the drivers for Lenovo, I did use the system update, so it picks this Rapid Boot package up, at least it did in my case.  Also, after removing RapidBoot, my problem has gone away. Thank you for this.  I would be careful, if you use the Lenovo System Update, it'll try to put RapidBoot back, as I just ran this and it picked up this package on my machine. 

Michael

[harrisb]

I have RapidBoot 1.11 installed and Windows Search is set to Automatic (delayed start), but it functions properly.

[PanEuropean]

Fascinating discussion.

I had problems with indexing (Windows Search) when I first got my W520.  The index kept rebuilding from scratch, which takes quite a while (I have about 280,000 items in my index).  I could not figure out why the darn index kept rebuilding itself.

The computer has not rebuilt the index (to my knowledge, anyway) for about 2 weeks now, so, it appears that the problem has gone away.  Coincidentally, I installed the most recent version (1.1.1) of RapidBoot about 2 weeks ago...

Michael

[averkiev]

RapidBoot is the most likely culprit. In my case Windows Search was working just fine. Then I uninstalled RapidBoot (I don't need it since I use a SSD drive). The uninstall disabled Windows Search service. I fixed the problem by changing the start-up mode to Automatic.