itaysk

Here’s a quick tip that might help you some day. (It did for me..)

SharePoint stores some of it’s search configurations (that are usually configured through the SSP Admin UI) in the windows registry of the index server.

Now, there are basically 2 search services for a typical MOSS farm: Windows SharePoint Services Search  Service (WSS Search), and Office Server Search Service (MOSS Search). The differences between them are explained here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263400.aspx#section1

Lets take for example the file types (to crawl) configuration, that is normally controlled from Central Administration –> SSP Administration –> Search Settings –> File types (http://YourSSPHost/ssp/admin/_layouts/managefiletypes.aspx).

  
This setting is saved for MOSS Search in the following registry path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Applications\GUID\Gather\Portal_Content\Extensions\ExtensionList and for WSS Search: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Applications\GUID\Gather\Search\Extensions\ExtensionList

In this location, you will find a list of string valued keys, each has a unique ascending number as name, and the file extension as value.
Basically you can add your file extensions directly here, it’s pretty much the same as from the GUI interface.

Note that the GUI interface doesn’t exist at all for WSS Search. So if you want to configure this setting for WSS, you HAVE TO manually add the keys here.