I have spent countless hours searching for a resolution to this problem.  On a fresh install of Windows 2003 server, Visual Studio 2003 and MSDN, I would search for anything in MSDN and the title column would only have a single 'a' in every line and the rank and location columns would be blank.  You can click on the entires and it would bring up the help, but the search result window was useless.

After must searching, installing, uninstalling and reinstalling with no luck.  Finally a few minutes ago I found posts from two people that fixed their system.  The first was a long list of things to uninstall, delete from the registery and files to delete along with multiple reboots and reinstalling.  A little more searching found the one step answer.

To solve the problem simply reregister the hxds.dll file:

regsvr32 "\program files\common files\microsoft shared\help\hxds.dll"

Also, if you run into script errors when you bring up pages in MSDN, you might try registering the CookDoc.dll and the DocUtil.dll libraries in:

\program files\common files\microsoft shared\MSDN

That single command made MSDN search work properly again.  Sure which I would have found out before multiple installs ;)