with regard to the creation of the application  pool and restarting and
what not... if you've got a server  farm (i.e. more than one server
that acts as a web  front end) then you would have to go to each of the
servers and make sure that they're in sync with the others.

if you've just got a single server, then you shouldn't have anything
to worry about. during the web application creation process there is
a radio button where you can choose to have central admin restart iis
automatically or you go and do so yourself through command line / gui
mode.

with regard to the search  service - did you start it and associate the
web application that you've created  with the search service? if not
then it's not going to search the web application...

By Monday morning the application  pool issue had resolved itself. I am working
with a two server  farm.

However; i am still having a search  problem. I have successfully started the
search service  on server a and have associated the application with the search
server. I still do not get any response other than " Your search cannot be
completed because this site  is not assigned to an indexer. Contact your
administrator for more information."

Last Friday my response was that the term cannot be found. I am confused.

So the work around that I found  for that was to make sure that you had the
proper permissions for the application  pool or user identity that runs
search within SQL server.

I want to say that the last time  that I had that problem I decided rather
than wasting time to just start over...