When I am in search administration looking at scopes(siteurl/ssp/admin/_layouts/viewscopesssp.aspx?mode=ssp) I can click the refresh link repeatedly and the values for the People scope alternates between 8 and 326. I believe 326 is correct. The value for All Sites scope also varies between 36 and 18235, and I believe the larger value to be correct.
Also when I use the search center, I can enter my name in the text box with the people tab selected and repeatedly click search. A result will appear for me, then randomly disappear and reappear as I click the search button.
This could be related to another problem I have with one of my web front ends. whenever I enable it as a query server, it creates a host file on my index server for this front end using the ip for the load balance ip of the sharepoint url. Because of this i have been leaving the query service turned off. I'm not sure why it creates this host file entry, but it could be because on this particular WFE is the shared service provider web app.
If anyone could at lease explain how this is supposed to work maybe i can figure it out but it's got me stumped.
