Wasn't there recent work done on search and forums so the problem Tammy mentions is no longer a problem? Or did I misunderstand one of the other threads.
Regardless, since forums doesn't use the content repository (yet) the content repository can't be blamed for this behavior :)
Yes, we changed the forums search so that it indexes full threads only and not single messages, but as far as I know it's not part of the toolkit yet, only of the openacs.org site. And old messages are still indexed the old way - it needs a full reindexing which Dave plans to do later together with other things.