Pardon me if I did not get the right Forum category. First time Forum user - There are others I wanted as well, but it looks like one at a time. 

I am struggling to find a solution for one of our customers supporting one of our legacy products. The customer has recently migrated to Windows Server 2008 32-bit. We have a VB6 Client application that uses a browser control to search the document store for relevant files and returns the file name in a link, the abstract (first paragraph or so), and links for Hit Summary and Hit Detail.

The source of this information is a Classic ASP.Net web service connected to the old Indexing Service (Windows Search is disabled on the server for this reason - apparently you can't have both).  I am learning about the Indexing Service as I go, so I may be asking stupid questions.  Also - the asp.net code is very much like the samples from MSDN for searching the Indexing Service.

I know the "correct" path would be to get the customer on SharePoint and use Windows Search and a new Web Service. But due to certain restrictions it's either fix-it or leave-it. I am a software engineer so making code changes to asp.net is doable.

The Problem(s): I can't seem to get all the correct filters sorted out to get the expected returns. Problem #1 is the priority issue.

1. Word 2007 ".doc" files: I am not getting returns for Word 2007 ".doc" files. I would suspect probably not for earlier versions as well, but that has not been reported yet. However if I open the file in Word 2010 and save it as a 2007-2003 .doc the file is returned as expected. Since the customer has had our product for well over 10 years they have many Word files of several different versions. I have tried: Filter Pack Version 1 (2007) and Version 2 (2010) - those were the only versions I could find. I have tried with and without the filter DLL path added to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex]"DLLsToRegister". (There is no longer a way to add filters in the mmc console for our service) I have done the above for each filter and for both together. Same results.
2. PDF: This probably should be addressed to Adobe, but since we're here: Our configuration in the past used Adobe's IFilter 6 for PDF files. This now causes an error in the Indexing Service when scanning the files. After much research I was pointed to installing Acrobat Reader XI which has it's own filter DLL. No more errors, but no returns either. I finally started trying other versions and found that Acrobat Reader 9 was the only version that returns files, and even has the abstract. BUT, there is nothing for Hit Detail and Hit Summary. I have also tried the listing these DLLs in the registry setting described above. So I'm hoping that maybe someone who has my post read this far has maybe run across this issue and might have some pointers.

I took the following steps when making changes: Stop the Indexing Service, make change, start service, full rescan on all directories in the catalog.  It's very likely that I have tried so many things but still missing something basic.

I would appreciate any advice at all - thanks

Hi,

Are you using SharePoint as the backend of your client application? Would you please show more information about the infrastructure?

The SharePoint search engine can crawl content of Office documents with 2007 or later versions(docx), and PDF is also supported in SharePoint 2013. Since here's a SharePoint support forum, if your system has no relation to SharePoint, please post your question to other MSDN forums to get better response.

Thanks,
Reken Liu