Outlook 2007 indexing stuck at around 20,000 remaining

Question

Hello,
On Monday, a user called me and reported that it seemed that Instant Search in Outlook 2007 (Windows Vista) was stuck on ~20,000 remaining. I have dealt with this kind of problem in the past and it seemed the easiest thing to do was to rebuild the entire
index. This is painful because the user has over 50,000 emails, but when I've worked on similar issues earlier, it seemed the best thing to do. So, we'd leave Outlook open and running as much as possible and let the index rebuild.
I started that rebuild for the first user on Monday night.
Today, a second user from an entirely different site called me to report a very similar issue. Her Outlook is stuck at around 20,000 items remaining. She's also on Vista.
So, now the red flags are flying. Two users from two different sites on two different Exchange servers seeing the same stuck indexing level in Outlook?
Before I rebuild this second user's index -- and I suspect that she has much more than 50,000 emails -- is there anything else I can do? Have there been any recent patches that might alter search behavior? 
Any help is appreciated! Of course!

Answer 1

Hi,
There are a couple of levels at which Instant Search can break. You can troubleshoot Instant Search in following methods:
Marked for indexing
File-> Options-> section Search-> button Indexing Options…-> button Modify-> expand Microsoft Outlook
In the list that is shown under Microsoft Outlook, make sure that your pst-file is displayed and selected. If it is not listed, you’ll have to recreate your mail profile.
Check for pst-file corruptions
If your pst-file has been marked but Outlook doesn’t display the correct results, it usually means there is some corruption going on in your pst-file. In order to fix these you should scan your pst-file for errors with scanpst.exe. You can find this file
in the same folder as outlook.exe or use OutlookTools (free!) to locate it for you.
For Outlook 2010 you must click in the Search field in order to make the Search Tools tab visible in the Ribbon. Here click the Search Tools button and select the
Indexing Status…
Disable and then re-enable the file for indexing
Go back to the Search Options and deselect the data file that is giving you issues. Close Outlook and wait for about 5 minutes and also verify in Task Manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC) that on the Processes tab the outlook.exe process actually quits. You might get a
lot of disk activity; this is the Search Indexer removing the indexed items from the Index.
After this open Outlook again and go back to the Search Option and select the pst-file we just deselected. Leave the computer idle again and see if it will eventually
reach the status of "0 items remaining."
Rebuild the index
If it doesn’t, it might be that the Index itself has been damaged. In order to reset this, go to Control Panel-> Indexing Options-> Advanced-> button Rebuild
This will rebuild the entire Index from scratch and depending on the amount of documents to be indexed, this could take quite long and degrade your system’s
performance while the Indexer is still busy. I would recommend to have it rebuild itself overnight.
Hope that helps.