I have been having trouble getting our search server up and running. I have three SharePoint servers deployed in our farm.  A web frontend, a index/search server and a SQL database server.  I am getting the following error in my search logs

https://intranet.ourdomain.com
Access is denied. Check that the Default Content Access Account has access to this content, or add a crawl rule to crawl this content. (The item was deleted because it was either not found or the crawler was denied access to it.) 
 
  sps3s://intranet.ourdomain.com
Access is denied. Check that the Default Content Access Account has access to this content, or add a crawl rule to crawl this content. (The item was deleted because it was either not found or the crawler was denied access to it.)

I have applied the DisableLoopbackCheck fix described in numerous blogs and tech articles by doing the following
1. Added DisableLoopbackCheck to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa to both the index and web frontend server
2. Added BackConnectionHostNames to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\MSV1_0\ and added intranet.ourdomain.com.  that didn't work so I tried https://itnranet.ourdomain.com and that didn't work either

One forum entry here also stated they changed the default access account from ourdomain.com\username to username@ourdomain.com but that hasn't worked for me either.

I've verified that the account I'm using can log into the intranet site.  What else can I try at this point?