Well I'm an idiot - the fulltext index on page_text was missing from a default installation. It didn't break searches but probably slowed them down tremendously. Also set engine to MyISAM on page_text to avoid cryptic error messages from MySQL.

/* CSS file for cell dialog in the table plugin */

.panel_wrapper div.current {
	height: 200px;
}

.advfield {
	width: 200px;
}

#action {
	margin-bottom: 3px;
}

#class {
	width: 150px;
}