I have a large # of documents stored in file folders.  I'd like a
solution where I can feed these documents into a scanner, have them
scanned unattended, have software running that OCRs the documents and
saves the scanned image + the text of the document that I can search. 
I'd like to get 1000 mostly 8 1/2 x 11 documents scanned in a 2 week
period.  What hardware and software do I need to make this scenario
happen?

At the office I can do 1000 pages in a day easily, here's how I did it:

1) I removed staples from the documents (silly, but this is most of the work).
2) Put them in the feeder of our Xerox docucolor, multipage document
by multipage document (so grouped).
3) it automatically scans them to PDFs
4) I fully automatically OCR-ed and put the text behind the image in all PDFs.

If all your documents happen to be one page document the job is even
easier of course.
If you want to do this at home you'll need a scanner with document
feeder obviously. Let us know more if you need to know more :)

Good luck!

What system or software accomplishes step 4?

Or, you could have the folks at 

http://www.DigitalDocumentsLLC.com

prep, scan, OCR and create PDF's for pennies per page