SharePoint 2010 – Search Error access denied

If you’ve been getting the below error in SharePoint 2010 you have probably come across the REGEDIT DisableLoopbackCheck fix.

Access is denied. Verify that either the Default Content Access Account has access to this repository, or add a crawl rule to crawl this repository. If the repository being crawled is a SharePoint repository, verify that the account you are using has “Full Read” permissions on the SharePoint Web Application being crawled.

This seems like  an easy fix – you know – just add the new DWORD entry.  Well, I did that a week ago, and it didn’t solve my problem.  5 days of trying everything under the sun I went back to check the registry entry.  HERE IS MY ADVICE TO YOU – take note that when creating your new entry “DWORD (32-bit) Value” and “QWORD (64-bit) Value” are right next to each other!

As it turns out, when I created my new DWORD entry for DisableLoopbackCheck at 1:30 am I accidentally created it as a QWORD.  This, if you hadn’t guessed already, doesn’t work.  So – lesson learned.  I’m now down from over 29,000 errors to less than 3,000, and those are largely due to poorly named files in an email enabled list.