This may be stupidly obvious, but does the crawl  account have access to the
content?

Also, have you disabled the loopback "protection" feature?

weblogs.asp.net/.../service-packs-and-registr\
y-hacks.aspx

I did in fact confirm the content account
(login to windows using the account and then login to SSMS using window
authentication)

I also initiated the registry hack, using the url to the portal as the value.

Unfortunatley, I am still in a quandry. Any other suggestions?

To help you out I will need some more information.
1. your search  does not return result for any site or for a particular site.
2. Is the mentioned crawl  log error  for all the sites or for a particular site.
If it is for a particular site then is it for a particular URL?

3. Go to your search DataBase it is generally SharedServices1_Search_DB_<GUID>
and open the table MSSCrawlHostList. What is the ErrorCount for various hosts?

In the mean time you can try following. And after each step do the crawling and
try to search.
1. Restart the search service from services.msc
2. Reset Crawled Content and start full crawl.
3. Stop and start the search service from Central Admin.

I understand that you are using MOSS 2007 and not WSS 3.0

Let me know if it works for you.

I'll try to answer your questions:

1) The search  return no results  for ANY of the sites.

2)The error  is for the one and only site that I specify in my settings... in
this case http://portal, which is the main site that everything is under.
Strangely though, the one error is for portal, but there are also 4
"successfully crawled", all of which are also portal.

3)The finding are:
portal 4 1 0
anchor 0 0 0
c5bad4f7-79fc-4521-a0e2-4f13e5684fe8 0 0 0

I'm afraid that the three steps that you suggested were not successful.

Are you running SP1? If so look at this
doc:http://support.microsoft.com/kb/890630