Users without administrative privileges cannot see secure content, even though they have read permission on the file.
System administrators are able to perform a query and have the secure content returned.
The high performance query path has no sort clauses, and no hit count is retrieved. Sometimes having the rank clause can also lead to this behavior. The high performance queries are run in the context of the user's security, which does not have permission to open the security table unless the user is an administrator. To resolve this problem, apply the latest Site Server 3.0 service pack. This problem has been corrected in the latest U.S. service pack for Microsoft Site Server version 3.0.