I have tried several things; stillno luck so far;

1.  I am querying in English.  To be safe I made the changes to the
ts.ENS.xml, ts.ENG.xml, and ts.ESN.xml files.

2.  The datatype for the SectionText column that I am searching was
ntext.  I inherited this db which was originally created in Access and
migrated to Sql 2000.  So I changed the datatype to nvarchar(max) to
make it conform to modern standards.  Still no luck.

3.  I created a new SQL Server 2005 db with full-text search enabled
and moved all the data over from the old one which I believe is still
SQl 2000.

4.  I wondered if case mattered in the xml file (since Leydig is in
caps in SectionText), so I altered the xml like this:

<XML ID="Microsoft Search Thesaurus">

   <thesaurus xmlns="x-schema:tsSchema.xml">
    <diacritics_sensitive>0</diacritics_sensitive>
       <expansion>
           _Leydig
           _leydig
           _littre
       </expansion>
       <replacement>
           <pat>NT5</pat>
           <pat>W2K</pat>
           _{Windows 2000}
       </replacement>
       <expansion>
           _run
           _jog
       </expansion>
   </thesaurus>

</XML>

5.  I wondered if this could be a limitation of Sql Server 2005
Express, so I moved everything over to my Vista machine running Sql
Server 2005 Developer Edition.  No luck.

6.  I wondered if there was something problematic with my choice of
search terms so tried new ones by changing xml and sql like this:

       <expansion>
           _vagus
           _{pneumogastric}
       </expansion>

SELECT FullDocNo
FROM FullDocuments
WHERE CONTAINS(SectionText, 'vagus')    *** returned 213 rows ***

SELECT FullDocNo
FROM FullDocuments
WHERE CONTAINS(SectionText, 'pneumogastric')  *** returned 514 rows
***

SELECT FullDocNo
FROM FullDocuments
WHERE CONTAINS(SectionText, ' FORMSOF(THESAURUS, vagus) ')
***returned 213 rows ***

So it still does not seem to work.

In case you are wondering, the db contains old antiquated medical
terms that are unfamiliar to modern clinicians and researchers but are
useful when interpreting old medical manuscripts.

I am out of ideas for now.  Any thoughts on what is wrong?

You're welcome
I'm happy for you.

--
Jean-Pierre Riehl