I've created a collection in verity, but when I use cfsearch on it I get this error:
Message: There was a problem executing the cfSearch tag with the following collections.
Detail: Collection (status code): asktheexpert (-1705)
I have restarted the search service to no avail.
any tips?
From what I can gather from various googling, this indicates some sort of index corruption, and in general people never really worked out why. But if you purge & reindex your collection, it should go away.
I haven't used Verity in an age, but my experiences that most "weird errors" (one of which was this very one) were "solved" with a purge/reindex.
Ref: http://www.coldfusionjedi.com/index.cfm/2006/4/5/Verity-1-Me-1705 (and others along a similar vein, but Ray's probably the most reliable).
Are you in a position to migrate away from Verity? It's dead technology and will be dropped from CF in the next release. It might be a good idea to think about migrating to Solr if you haven't already got plans afoot to do so.
EDIT: Another thing I've read today about this is that it might crop up when the collection is using one language, and the index and/or search are using different languages. Given you're transporting code between dev & prod, perhaps just verify that the collection language is the same as the index & search language.
Other than that - and my suggestions below about destroying various bits and pieces and starting again :-/ - I'm out of ideas.