Windows Search Service not working after Windows 8.1 Upgrade

Finally found a solution to this after about 2 weeks of on and off troubleshooting. This was in Windows 8.1. Indexing was not running, all options were grayed out, and no solutions I tried (registry changes, etc) worked.

A few posters suggested going to 2 directories and deleting all the files in those folders:

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Temp\

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\

However, this solution was initially impossible for me, because the first directory (Temp) and all the files in the 2nd directory (Windows) would DISAPPEAR upon trying to view them. They would be there for a second when I first entered the directory, and then vanish. Since I couldn't get to them, I couldn't delete them. I've never seen files and folders do that before.

I fixed this by renaming the "Windows" folder to "Windows.old," and immediately the system generated a replacement where the files didn't disappear!  I then did the same thing with the "Temp" folder, but this time it didn't auto-generate a new folder, so I just made one myself.

I didn't even have to delete the files in the newly generated folders. Indexing started working immediately after the new folders were created.

Hope this helps someone!

If you are using either Norton Utilities 16 or System Mechanic 12 or maybe some other registry checking/repair program, my experience (on two separate 8.1 systems) is that both NU or SM will stop Windows Search service during their automated registry check/repair routines and will produce an Error 2 missing file message if you try and restart Windows Search service.   You can recover/restart Windows Search service by rolling back/undoing the registry changes made by these utilities using their built-in registry change undo tools.  Once Windows Search starts back up Indexing for Outlook deleted e-mails or other programs/folders will also restart but may take a while to rebuild depending on how much is indexed.  To avoid having this issue in the future, you should disable the automatic registry check routines on all registry check programs you may have running, at least until all this gets resolved.

Microsoft has apparently made some changes to Windows 8.1 that aren't compatible with how Norton and Iolo do their registry check routines, and so far the latter's engineers have not released updates to either program which prevents this issue from happening.  None of these issues existed for me with Windows 8.0, 7 or prior Windows versions.