Once you get sphinx working, you will know immediately. Your searches will run in 1/100th of the time it used to take, and your database load will ease out a lot.
Make sure vb adminCP is set to fulltext search. If it is set to default search, then your forum will keep running the code to update the index tables. Once you are sure sphinx is working properly, just drop the fulltext indexes (from mysql, not from vb admincp).
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