Although the "settings" section of the administrator allows me to say I want the meta tag "description" displayed, and I have set it and saved the settings (after having set the display word count to 250), my searches do not show the meta "description". Am I missing something? Thanks for any help!

Strange. Because for me it works quite well. I used the Spider settings as per download.
Only the option
Show meta description in results page if it exists . . .
was additionally activated. No problem at all. Seems not to be a general bug in Sphider scripts.

In order to follow your issue, let us know the URL you indexed. Eventually the description meta tag is not well defined.

Tec