I don’t know why this wasn’t working, but search on my SharePoint VM wasn’t indexing the collaboration portal that was our top level site collection – indeed, it wasn’t even crawling it. So I changed the start path to the fully qualified path (e.g. http://vm-moss07/ to http://vm-moss07.dev.deltascheme.com/), and now at least a few pages were crawled – those being, unfortunately, the pages that redirected to the ‘not fully qualified’ path. So I put both into the content source – and it crawled the whole site collection correctly.

I’m really not sure why, to be honest. I haven’t checked the alternative access mappings, but I don’t see why the search didn’t work without the fully qualified server name. The crawling of the My Sites and Central Admin site collections worked fine without being fully qualified.

I’m sure it’s something simple – any guesses anyone?