Windows SharePoint Services 3 Search Event ID 2436

I was combing through the event logs on a server I set up recently when I ran across an Warning event occurring exactly every hour.

Log Name:      Application Source:        Windows SharePoint Services 3 Search Date:          7/22/2009 6:34:03 PM Event ID:      2436 Task Category: Gatherer Level:         Warning Keywords:      Classic User:          N/A Computer:      server.domain.com Description: The start address <sts3://SSP_URL/contentdbid={GUID}> cannot be crawled. Context: Application 'Search index file on the search server', Catalog 'Search' Details:     The object was not found.   (0x80041201)

After much research to no avail I had almost given up and decided it didn’t actually matter as there was nothing in the SSP that I actually needed to search. However, it finally dawned on me that the issue was that there was no root site for the SSP Web Application, just the /ssp/admin. I created an empty root and the issue immediately went away.

Also, I slept much better knowing that my event logs were nice and clean. :-)