For the longest time I'd had problems with searching (as many of you
have probably read in my posts)...particularly with finding
information from WSS sites at portal-level search.

I think I've found a solution to this problem, just wanted to verify
it with people who are familiar with it...turns out that only one
person was actually a user of the site collection, and no one else,
and the search was working for her account and no one else's...I am a
site collection administrator, but I was not an actual user of the
site...went in and added myself and did a search...voila, my search
scopes including those sites in that collection finally worked..

I'm basically putting this out as an FYI for others to reference, but
also wanted to make sure that was the right step to take...seems to
be!