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 table dialog in the table plugin */
.panel_wrapper div.current {
height: 220px;
}
.advfield {
width: 200px;
}
#class {
width: 150px;
}