SharePoint 2010: Crawls get paused if the crawl components temp folder is deleted

Consider the following scenario:

You have a SharePoint Server 2010 environment where crawls on some of the content sources do not appear to be making any progress at all for a significant period of time. The following error is logged in the SharePoint ULS logs:

"Application 'crawl component name' - failed to CreateTempFolderForCacheFiles"

The following error can also be seen in the Application Event Log of the crawl component's host server:

"The system cannot find the path specified. (0x80070003)"

Every crawl component has a local temporary folder where the index files are created. If the local folder gets deleted, the search service automatically attempts to re-create the folder. However, if the search service fails to create the folder, you will not be able to initiate crawling on any of the content sources associated to the crawl component. 

In order to resolve this problem, please create the folder at the appropriate path with the correct name. Once the folder has been created, the crawls should be able to get started. The path and the name of the folder that needs to be created can be determined using PowerShell. Run the following PowerShell commands on the server that hosts the crawl component having the problem:

$app = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication "<Name of your Search Service Application>"
$crawlComponents = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchCrawlComponent -CrawlTopology $app.CrawlTopologies.ActiveTopology | where {$_.ServerName.ToLower().Equals($Env:COMPUTERNAME.ToLower()) }
foreach ($component in $crawlComponents)
{
 $path = $component.IndexLocation + "\" + $component.Name
 Write-Host "Crawl Component "$component.Name " is hosted on the current server and is using the folder " $path
}

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