sharepoint portal 2003

oh yes, of course, SPS2003 is old news, especially with the launch of 2007 just around the corner. but, in all my wisdom, and after a lot of frustration trying to deal with the lack of proper document management at my current place of employment, i suggested we implement a SPS (or similar) solution.

i have been tasked with setting up a demo environment, as well as putting together a deployment project, including costing, to present to the directors in about a week's time.

i haven't installed or configured SPS in quite some time, so it has been a lot of fun and games the past couple of days getting everything up and running in the test environment (my laptop for now).
the main requirement for every single person in the company is to be able to search for documents, including content searches. and, of course, this is the part of the configuration that has given me the most grey hairs - with a very simple solution. it would seem that .Net framework 2.0 interferes with SPS's ability to index content on the portal.
it happily indexed all the network shares i configured as non-portal content to index, and even content searches worked for these documents. but it point blank refused to index as much as a single document from the portal itself, or any of the sites.

after uninstalling the .net framework 2.0, it has indexed all the files on the portal and sites, but i am still to find a search query that returns any of the documents from the sites/portal - so i guess i need to keep trying.