The Network Path was not found. in SharePoint Search

Today I was working with Search Server Express 2008 to index a folder share on our network. I set up the share and pointed it to the correct path. I then set the content source to run a full crawl and monitored the results of the crawl. After 7 seconds it had finished the crawl and I knew that that was a little too soon considering there were a few items in that folder. So I took a look at the crawl logs and saw that there was an error that said 'The Network Path was not found.' So I clicked on the link that is above the error and was able to open the path just fine.

I then thought about the account that the crawl was running as and the account that I am using when clicking on the link. So I tried indexing a folder share that the content crawling account did have access to and it was able to index the content without any problems.

Something to keep in mind when using the SharePoint search or Search Server 2008: make sure that your content crawl access account has access to the content you want to crawl because the error log will not report a useful error. If you try to look into the SharePoint 12 hive logs you will not see any errors in there. So if you run across 'The Network Path was not found' error check the permissions on the share to make sure your index account has access to it.