Presence of UNC path in PATH Environment Variable

If your computer running Microsoft® Windows NT does have a UNC path specification present in the system PATH variable or in the user PATH variable, you may experience problems with Full-Text indexing and Full-Text Search. First, double-check whether you have a UNC path specification in your PATH variable. To do this, issue echo %path% from the command prompt. If you have a UNC path specification, you will see one or more paths of the form \\computer_name\share_name.

The symptoms of these problems may include one or more of the following:

• When attempting to issue a full-text query, you receive an error message stating “Full-text query failed because full-text catalog '<your_fulltext_catalog_name>' is not yet ready for queries.”
• The Item count, Catalog size, and Unique word count options (located in the Properties dialog box in SQL Server Enterprise Manager) are all set to 0, even though you populated this full-text catalog.
• The Windows NT application log has “stop event” items logged, where Source is Microsoft Search and Category is Indexer. In addition, one of these error event items contains the following error message:

“Unable to load DLL <X:\Program Files\Common Files\system\ContentIndex\ontciutl.dll>. Error 5 - Access is denied.”

Note X refers to the drive letter where your Program Files\Common Files directory resides on your computer.

Two possible solutions to this problem are:

• If possible, remove the UNC path specification(s) in the SYSTEM and USER PATH variables. Replace these UNC path(s) with remapped drive(s).
• Add the location \%SYSTEMDRIVE%\Program Files\Common Files\SYSTEM\ContentIndex in front of any UNC path specification in the SYSTEM path.

Note After making any of these changes, restart your computer. SYSTEM path changes do not take effect until the computer is restarted.

If you have not attempted to repopulate your full-text catalog(s) after the addition of the UNC path specification(s) in your user or system PATH variables, you can use Full-Text Search. If you have attempted repopulation, you must rebuild your full-text catalog(s) and then repopulate them before you can issue full-text queries.

See Also