Last night I tried changing the application pool that the SharePoint service accounts use to be a lesser privileged account (it had been originally set up to use the farm account!). Â I added a new managed account and updated the IIS service applications app pool to use this new account via Central Admin. Â Most everything worked fine, all the other service apps with the exception of the search service. Â When searching for sites or people, the results page would not load and the error in the ULS logs was:
CoreResultsWebPart::OnInit: Exception initializing: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
Are there other permissions that need to be set somewhere in order for the search to work? Â Do the search databases need special permissions?