SharePoint Search Service Or How to ruin my week

I recently had to fix a SharePoint Search Service that stopped out of the blue. Something that was working and had stopped.
The issue was when you went to the search application you got the following.



Crawl: The search service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component. Verify that the administration component  "systemname"  status - in search application Search Service Application is in a good state and try again."

After checking that the SQL was up, the associated dbs were online (crawl,admin and property). And that the service account was associated.

So after checking a few links ( handy dandy google.) I tried somepowershell commands to check on the service


To remove some old Search Data

http://jshidell.com/2011/09/01/unable-to-remove-search-service-application-in-sharepoint-2010/

And removed the search service app pool plus some other app pools

http://jshidell.com/2011/09/01/removing-unused-service-application-app-pools-in-sharepoint-2010-using-powershell/