Stopping the Indexing service also worked for me. After rebooting I also had tell Vista to re-index my hardrive(s) and reboot a seconds time so vista could do the re-index. To do this I click on the program menu and searched for 'indexing'. I clicked on 'advance' which hung indexing so I stopped the SearchIndexer.exe process in taskmanager. After doing this the advance window showed up and I clicked on 'restore defaults'. I recieved a message to that I would need to reboot to restore the default and rebuild the indexing. After rebooting everything appears to be back to normal.