My apologies Hilary, I see that the error that I pasted was actually some
code I was working with!  My definition of "flake out" would be getting the
regular guest of "An unknown full text failure (80004005) occurred in
function EnumCatalogs on full-text catalog ''." on one staging server and
most recently and never before seen by me as of last week "The Microsoft
Search service cannot be administered under the present user account" on a
second staging server.

I'm running SQL 2000 on both and within the last year I've had to reload two
servers from the ground up (windows installs included) in order to resolve
the first error message.  What I'm trying to figure out is, what additional
troubleshooting I can do to:

Determine what caused the problem versus searching the msdn/technet articles
for this message only to find what seems to be multiple guesses as to what I
can check that has caused the problem (registry, permissions, accounts used,
manual reinstall, etc) when none of these things (in my opinion) would ever
be changed.  I've yet to find any of these resolving my problem, including
the manual reinstall of MSSearch.  I've always found nothing changed or
missing from the MSDN/Technet articles and therefore only resolved, for a
number of months at a time, the problem by reinstalling.

Currently that is my planned track for this upcoming weekend (what an
exciting time I'll have).  There needs to be a more specific error message
for these full text index issues in my opinion - esp. when you find articles
that list 4-5 solutions to the same error.

Adam