Have your catalogs finished building? IIRC Service Pack 4 involves a
rebuilding of your full-text catalogs.
From:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/B/D/1BDF5B78-584E-4DE0-B36F-C44E06B0D2A
3/ReadmeSql2k32sp4.htm#_full-text_catalogs_will_be_rebuilt_after_setup_completes
All full-text catalogs are rebuilt as part of the installation of SP4 when
upgrading from SP2 or earlier. The rebuild is automatic and
resource-intensive. Queries against full-text catalogs may return partial
results or no results until the rebuild process is complete. After SP4 is
installed, the system event logs contain messages stating that the catalogs
were corrupt, of an older version, and had to be rebuilt.
For information , see the Knowledge Base article 327217, which also
discusses possible workarounds for keeping full-text search available during
the rebuild process and to avoid an automatic rebuild.
Also the algorithim changed between the two service packs. You might want to
set remote timeout to a larger value to see if this helps.
sp_configure 'remote query timeout (s)' ,10000
reconfigure with override

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>I tried all of that, but the only way to get the fts running, is to restart
> the server.
>
>> Did you try rebuilding the index or re-doing the FTS Catalog? And next
>> time
>> FTS mucks up maybe try just restarting the service? Thanks!
Josef Huber - 09 Jul 2007 15:30 GMT
Thanks for your help, Hillary and Mohit.
I uninstalled SQL server today and reinstalled it afterwards with SP4 and
everything works fine now.
thx, Josef
> Have your catalogs finished building? IIRC Service Pack 4 involves a
> rebuilding of your full-text catalogs.
[quoted text clipped - 26 lines]
> >> time
> >> FTS mucks up maybe try just restarting the service? Thanks!