Mysteriously disappearing Drupal search fields

The problem I was having was that I had a search field which showed up when I was logged in as admin, but not when I hit the site anonymously (as an aside, one of the benefits of using multiple browsers is that you can save admin user/pass on one, and keep another for testing). I looked through both the tpl files and the database and didn't see any reason why this should be happening. I finally found the solution here: http://drupal.org/node/213586 Basically, "search" is a permission in Drupal, and the anonymous user doesn't get permission by default. So you need to:

1. Go to User Management -> Permissions [caption id="attachment_22" align="alignnone" width="323" caption="Go to User Management -> Permissions"][/caption]
2. Under search module check the box to give permission to an anonymous user to search content: [caption id="attachment_23" align="alignnone" width="830" caption="Under the search module check the box for the anonymous user to access search content"][/caption]
3. Save these settings

Assuming that your search field was showing up when you were logged in as admin -- which means that you had the Search Module enabled, and that one of your page Blocks is configured to hold the search field -- you should be good to go!