Content index is stuck with no (or few) documents

Just had a problem in a customer site, where the search index for non_portal_content was always on 3 documents, even though the customer had about 17 site collections, all with documents and lists with items. No matter how many times I reset the index, or tried setting up new ones, nothing was added to the index! If this happens to you, I recommend the following troubleshooting stages:

1. Check that the sites are crawled. In "Site Settings" > "Manage crawls of Site Directory" make sure the sites you want are approved. didnt help me - they were all approved.
2. Make sure you are running SPS SP2. Some search issues are resolved after installing SP2. To determine you are running SP2, go to the "control panel" > "add\remove programs" and check the "about" of SPS. the version should be 11.0.8126.0 (for the english version anyway). this improved matters for me - the portal index suddenly worked better, but still empty non_portal_contents
3. Do a "Hard Reset" of the index Ok - last resort: 3.1. First stop the "Microsoft SharePointPS Search" service. 3.2. Now, go to where you installed sharepoint (or if you set the indexes to be in a different location) for example - "C:\Program Files\SharePoint Portal Server\DATA\01b905a4-6f4b-4f3b-bab9-0702d5d86968" and you should see there the "Non_Portal_Content" folder. 3.3. Rename the "Non_Portal_Content" folder to "Non_Portal_Content_Old". 3.4. Start the "Microsoft SharePointPS Search" service again. 3.5 Go to the search administration screen and make sure the index is starting a crawl

Thats it! the last thing solved my problem. the "stuck" index was fully crawled and search works as expected.

Hopes this helps anyone...if not - dont blame me!