Thank you OllyP - we have discussed this type of document/article and will more than likely put something together. Thank you for the input.
For your search issue, we have perfmon counters that you can add to watch while the catalog is being rebuilt. See this link for more information - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123701.aspx - you can watch the perfmon counters to determine what the Full Crawl status is, is it still crawling, is it finished? How many items failed to be indexed?
Once the rebuild of the catalog is finished and we see that a full crawl has completed (use perfmon) can your users now search without issue in OWA?
Thank you again for the input,
Jack