What vendor or technology will help me take 100 issues of a paper
magazine and make it into a CD-ROM set or DVD with searching
capability?

Examples: The "Complete New Yorker", 4000+ issues on 7 DVDs. Totally
MAD (1999), Mad Magazine on a set of CD-ROMs. National Geographic has
also put out a similar set.

I would recommend that you use one of the many excellent
Javascript-based search engines normally used for indexing and searching
a web site. Many of them now have support for WordPerfect, Word, PDF,
and Excel file formats and can create indexes for CDs and DVDs. They
provide many of the advanced features that people are used to when
searching on the web and provide the same user-friendly interface as
web-based search engines do in any modern web browser.

As examples, I would recommend either Zoom
(http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/) and the necessary  Zoom plugins (with
Javascript option) or Atrise Everyfind
(http://www.atrise.com/everyfind/). For Zoom, the standard version will
run you $49 (and is limited to 100 files) or $99 for the professional
version. Atrise Commercial Project Edition will run you $120. With both,
you get royalty free distribution of the searches on your CD-ROM.

Screenshots are available on the product's sites.