I've been dealing with an annoying issue where the Windows Search service frequently gets stuck in the 'starting' state on a couple of our business machines. Just killing the process or rebooting the PC doesn't fix it. The indexing troubleshooter hangs too when trying to start the service. The only real fix I've found is to delete and rebuild the index, which is a hassle. Unfortunately, the problem tends to return after about a week. I've even wiped and rebuilt the machines, but the issue comes back after a few weeks. It's happening on two different machines, and I suspect it might be due to some software or configuration issue that's causing this hang-up, but I haven't been able to pinpoint exactly what it is. Any ideas on how to figure out what's causing this?
3 Answers
The Windows indexing service relies on SQL, so check if there's anything on those systems that might be interfering with it, or if the system is shutting down unexpectedly. If these are virtual machines, moving them between hosts or storage can also cause problems.
How old are your machines? Sometimes older machines can hang on services like this due to hardware issues.
One is 6 months old, and the other is less than 2 years old.
I've pretty much given up on the Windows Search feature. Sometimes it doesn't return files I know are there! I just turned off the service and switched to WizFile instead. It’s faster, and I don’t need it to index file contents anyway.
Interesting point! The two users are into a lot of data analytics, and they have some non-standard apps installed like Microsoft Visual Studio Code, PowerBi Desktop, Python 3.13, DBeaver CE, and R Studio. The machines are otherwise stable. Do you think one of these could be causing the issue?