Thankfully, upgrading to the latest nightly build seems to have fixed this issue so I don't know if that particular build I was using had problems or if something got corrupted. In any case, very grateful that search seems fixed.
If you have time, you might check the test site again to make sure that you don't get that error message (which I haven't seen).
Thanks.
Well I thought it was resolved. ... However I think I've discovered what guarantees the search to fail for me: turning on mod rewrite and selecting only tags to search in the search box. Clicking on a tag link seems fine.
With rewrite off, all works as expected.
If I enable mod_rewrite in gallery options, the default theme will display the correct count for images tagged with orchids and will show links to subsequent pages, but it will say no images found if one tries to go to following pages. However, as soon as I disable the rewrite option, the search works as expected on following pages.
I think this is because the link to 2nd page is incorrect with rewrite enabled.
With rewrite off, link for 2nd page of search shows:
http://natureinfocus.com/test/index.php?p=search&words=orchids&searchfields=tags&page=2
With rewrite on, second page link shows:
http://natureinfocus.com/test/page/search/orchids?searchfields=tags/2
which does not work instead of
http://natureinfocus.com/test/page/search/tags/orchids/2
which does work fine.
Yet if I search for certain combinations of fields such as tags and ttile, 2nd page link seems to work:
http://natureinfocus.com/test/page/search/orchids?searchfields=tags,title/2
You can verify this by clicking on the above links or at my test site which is using default theme with mod_rewrite enabled at http://natureinfocus.com/test . Search for orchids ans selecting only the tags field. AFAIK, any tag by itself will break the search.
I've purged image cache and internet cache. htaccess file is unchanged from what was installed by zenphoto.
Thanks - seems cured.