Finally, I took the time to Google for the removal of windows search. That thing is a waste of time and I had to keep going around it to do any serious searching. Fortunately, the Google search turned up David Arno’s site. He has a very clear explanation of how to remove it, and a work around if there are problems.
http://www.davidarno.org/2008/08/22/how-to-remove-windows-desktop-search-…-revisited/