I am running a single virtual machine for MOSS frontend connected to a
separate computer running SQL. I thought for this test environment it
would be ok to use the frontend for everything...

Disregard my post please. I scrapped the whole farm and started fresh.

It seems that there are several issues people have with Searching. I
have no idea if our problem is related, but we're finding that users
of our sites don't have permission to get to the 'search center' site
to view the results of a search. I can't find anything wrong in our
permissions set up. Others seem to have the same problem, but I'm
completely stumped.