Search indexing not working in Outlook PST files

Question

My boss recently got Office 2010 on his new laptop.  I copied his PST's from his old laptop whihc had Office 2003 on it to the new one and added them to his profile.  They are there and look to be workign fine, until you try any sort of search
on them.
If I am looking at the eMails in the PST and I see a whole lot from
[email protected] and then in the search box I type
[email protected] the emails are all firltered away and I am told that there are no items that match the criteria.  This also happens when I try try to run an advanced search.
So according to this post,
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/outlook/thread/b1859770-dfb5-4224-995f-be828bd21333, I disabled Indexing of outlook, then search stops working on my default location, i.e. if I search my inbox or anything in that datafile, I get
no results returned, but if I search one of the archieve PST files for say
[email protected] the search runs for ages with out retunring any results, if I stop the search and then rerun it then I get results.
It just seems a bit strange that I have to choose iether or.
Please help ASAP as my boss leave tomorrrow on a trip to Australia and I would like to get this sorted out be fore he leave.
Regards
A user needs the admin password like nitro glycerine needs a good shake.

Answer 1

This seems to be an ongoing problem. The instant search feature in Outlook 2010 is not working correctly for a large number of users. I have read many, many posts here in TechNet and many more that come up with a Google search. None of the solutions provided
are permanently solving the problem.
I have tried every potential solution I have found:
Rebuilding the index did not work
The registry key(s) PrevenIndexingOutlook, PreventIndexingEmailAttachments, did not exist (the Search Key did not exist). I tried adding both keys in 2 different suggested locations (HKCU and HKLM) Search indexing did not work with or without those keys
added.
I have tried everything that I have found everwhere to resolve this problem. I found one solution that appeared to work a month or so ago. Unfortunately, I cannot find it again and no new emails have been added to the index since that day (09/15/2010).
I tried rebuilding the index (again). This process has removed all of the emails from the index that had been there after I applied the fix that seemed to work. I am continuing to research this problem in the hope that I will find that previous partial solution.
It would be nice to get some feedback from Microsoft to let us know if this problem is being looked into. All of the solutions provided from Microsoft on these forums have failed to correct this long term problem.
FYI: I am running Windows 7 Ultimate (64 bit) and Office Professional Plus 2010. These were fresh installs, not upgrades. After installation the instant search feature in Outlook was working, I do not know exactly when it stopped working.