Hi Kenneth,
No, I hadn’t tried that. I did look all over the forum and the web for a solution to this before I posted (I promise!!),but for some reason I never stumbled across the above link. Based on your advice, and the info in the link, I deactivated and re-activated the few plug ins I have, as a starting point. You were right, it was a plug in issue.
As soon as I deactivated Google XML Site Search, the search function started woking.
Thanks so much for your help 🙂 🙂 🙂