It was like pulling teeth trying to get a solution for this until I contacted my old bud now down in Microsoft's North Carolina offices. He supplied the key to the solution after checking on an internal discussion list.
Of all the things I tried, I believe these steps did the trick:
- Install the Adobe iFilter for PDF's on the WSS front end machine. I didn't install this on the SQL Server where the content database or configuration database live.
- In RegEdit, check to see if HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\pdf is present and has a GUID for a default value (mine was {4C904448-74A9-11D0-AF6E-00C04FD8DC02})
- Check to see if HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Setup\Filters\.pdf is present and has: Default = (value not set) Extension = pdf FileTypeBucket REG_DWORD = 0x00000001 (1) MimeTypes = application/pdf
- Open the key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Applications\some GUID here\Gather\Search\Extensions\ExtensionList. This is the part that Mike clued me in on that I've never seen documented anywhere.
- There should be values 0-37 (plus default). Given that, Add a new REG_SZ value and name it 38.
- Set this new string value to pdf.
- Exit RegEdit.
- stop and start the Sharepoint Search Service. (net stop spsearch, net start spsearch).
I did this and added some PDF documents, then checked after some phone calls and found that search was now finding them. Yay! I don't know if this applies to MOSS 2007, but WSS 3.0 is what I needed.