Hi guys,

New things that I tried.

1. command prompt->regedit and I renamed
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL
Server\<Instance_Name>\Tracking\{E07FDDA7-5A21-11d2-9DAD-00C04F79D434}.

2. Tried to delete C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSSearch but
wasn't able to.

3. Went in manually and was able to delete most of the files except
tquery.dll, proppdefs.dll and mssws.dll as it kept saying that these
files were in use.

4. Unregistered these files using regsvr32 /u but still wasn't able to
delete them(wasn't able to unregister mssws.dll) .  Went under services
and stopped all sql server instances and tried to delete the files
again and still didn't work.

5. Under registry editor deleted
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Search and then started to
install sql server 2000. Selected my sharepoint instance and selected
to install Full-text service from the sub-components. After install was
finished, opened up the searchsetup.log under local settings\temp and
saw that the installation had taken place. Since I wasn't able to
delete some of the dlls in the MSSearch folder so the log contained
lines like

2/9/2006 16:39:59 INFO: InstallFile, SetupInstallFile did not replace
file : C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSSearch\Bin\mssws.dll

for mssws.dll, athprxy.dll, propdefs.dll and gathercl.dll and at the
end it contained these lines

2/9/2006 16:40:36 INFO: CSearchSetupEngine, Search setup completed.
2/9/2006 16:40:36 INFO: Main,
********************************************
2/9/2006 16:40:36 INFO: Main, ***  Setup is ending.  Returning
0x00000000
2/9/2006 16:40:36 INFO: Main,
********************************************

The c:\windows\sqlstp.log had the following log:

16:39:35 Begin Action InstallPkgs:
16:39:35 InstallMSSearch instance: SHAREPOINT
16:39:35 Software\Microsoft\Search\Install:Version not present
16:39:35 MSSearch 2.0 or greater version check returned -1
16:39:36 Setup is installing the Microsoft Full-Text Search Engine ...
16:39:36  "G:\SQL2000\x86\FullText\MSSearch\Search\SearchStp.exe" /s
/a:SQLServer$SHAREPOINT
16:40:36 Process Exit Code: (0)

Didn't restart the computer since it wasn't required as it said so in
the searchsetup.log file.

Started to install sp3a and it bombed out saying that another version
was already there(sp4).

Under services MSSearch and all the SQL instances were now running.

Went to SQL query analyzer for the sharepoint instance and typed

select fulltextserviceproperty('IsFulltextInstalled')  and got a 0.

Today off to drink, tommorrow go postal(take the day off and play Halo,
Halo-2 and Doom all day).