Forum: Ferret Acts As Ferret no search results

I'm trying to learn Rails by following the tutorial in the
Addison-Wesley book RailsSpace.

In the tutorial, there are a few models that are indexed with the
acts_as_ferret line.  I think that I have acts_as_ferret installed okay,
because those lines and the find_with_ferret method calls all return
okay.  However, for some reason acts_as_ferret doesn't seem to be
properly creating its index.  Starting from a deleted index, when I try
to run a search for * (or anything else), I'm getting no results.  The
log shows the following:

Will use local index.
using index in D:/rails_space/index/development/user
[user] rebuild index with models: []
[user] reopening index at D:/rails_space/index/development/user
[user] register class User with index user
[user] default field list for index user: ["screen_name", "email"]
index_for [User(id: integer, screen_name: string, email: string,
password: string, created_at: datetime, updated_at: datetime,
authorization_token: string)]
options: {:offset=>0, :limit=>:all, :page=>nil}
ar_options: {}
[user] stored_fields: nil
[user] query: *
-->+(* *) +(class_name:User)
[user] now retrieving records from AR with options: {}
[user] 0 results from AR: []
Query: *
total hits: 0, results delivered: 0

Anyone have any ideas what could be wrong here?  The only thing I can
think of is an installation problem, especially since installation was
pretty tough on my development machine which runs Windows.  Following
the wiki here:
http://rm.jkraemer.net/wiki/aaf
I installed the ferret gem, the system-wide acts_as_ferret gem, I
required acts_as_ferret in my environment.rb, I ran aafinstall in my
project root, and I manually unzipped the acts_as_ferret plugin into my
project vendor/plugins/acts_as_ferret directory (because for some reason
both the SVN and the git methods just return with no response or action
even though I have installed both).  I admit I don't entirely understand
the relationship between all these different installation steps, but it
seems like I have covered all the possibly redundant bases already?  Of
course, I would also really appreciate it if someone would take the time
to explain the relation between these steps in installing.