Re: erroe deleting unpublished content from content manager
once its created it should not have to be rebuilt entirely. If it doesn't exist it is created on the first search request after that it is maintained automatically when content is added or updated.
You can safely delete the index and it will rebuild but if the site is really large and has a lot of content I'm not sure how well it would work. It has always worked for me but in theory if the site had a lot of content the thread that builds the index could time out before finishing so once a site gets very large its probably best to avoid re-building the index and just let it maintain itself. Probably this is not an issue for most sites, only ones with a lot of content. I just don't know how big a site would have to be before this would be a problem but bigger than any of the sites I've worked with so far. Right now its just a theoretical problem.
Joe