"The protocol handler cannot be found. Check that the handler has been installed."

Gee, that sounds bad.  Last week I noticed that Search stopped serving results on the main site collection but worked fine on the MySite site collection.  That seemed to indicate that something got messed up in my Search database or configuration when I patched the server.

I went to Central Administration > Operations > Services on Server.  I stopped Windows SharePoint Services Help Search and Office SharePoint Search Server.  I then started the services back up making one change in the configuration--I changed the Database name in the WSS service.

After starting the services, I went to SSP and reconfigured my search settings (point to the server used for Search).  After a minute, the Search Settings page came up in SSP with blank statistics.  I ran a full crawl and Search worked again.