Rebuilding smart search indexex

Hi all,

I am attempting to rebuild some of my smart indexes. The search was broken on my site and I haven't found a way to fix it so I figured re-building the indexes would be a good place to start. The process tasks has a bunch of tasks in the smart-search Tasks module but it doesn't appear to be doing anything. And when I try to rebuild the indexes myself I get this error.

An error occured while obtaining the index writer. This may be caused by a fatal error or index corruption. Consider rebuilding the index if the problem persists.

I can click the process tasks button myself and view the progress, but when I view it it gives me a message that the task is not running. Has anyone seen this before? Where would I look to fix the index corruption? I've tried deleting and re-creating but I haven't had any luck. I'm open to try anything, and am open to any suggestions.

Thanks Jeff