Thank you for taking the time to help!
I had already matched the aMule.tmpl and webserver directories to the sources I built from.
I also investigated heavily whether locale was somehow affecting the search feature, trying all kinds of different things, starting with what you suggest (it is also my default locale). Nothing made any difference.
Then I rebuilt from the latest CVS. This was challenging. I finally figured that there is a dependency on wxWidgets CVS features later than 2.5.3, so I built that as well to solve the missing archive.h issue.
That got search working, except that the CVS tree is unstable for me.
Very frequently amuled seems to be wedged on startup and need to be restarted, with no output in the logs...
Well, it is always talking about trying to connect to "0.0.0.0 : 0" - which also shows up in the server list no matter how often it's deleted. Maybe that's a clue.
It could be coincidence, but I had a sense that if I delete server.met it does start, and run for a while (hours?) before it gets wedged like that again.
Well, it's a CVS version, so whatever. :]