Sharepoint woes, search permissions with AD and local users.

I've inherited a SharePoint box and I've got users as local users on the sharepoint box... first this is dumb but I've been told to deal with it. So these users are like consultants. They have limited access, but that's besides the point. They need to use MOSS 2007 search function at the top right, and it either returns no results or gives them some kind of access denied error. The normal AD domain users can use this search fine, but the local users to the sharepoint box can't. Any ideas?