I had Top Searches installed and it worked fine. The block for Top Searches was also behaving fine. However, after installation of the Taxonomy Stats module, things started going awry. I have reported this bug to them too as I am unsure who to contact between the owners of this module and the owners of the Taxonomy Stats. Yes. I realize its no one's job to make modules by two different developers play nice. However, since it has resulted in losing Top Searches completely, it seems to be noteworthy.

Relevant bug reported to owner of Taxonomy Stats: http://drupal.org/node/1405428

You see, between Taxonomy Stats and Top Searches, I need the functionality of Top Searches more for this project than the former. So Im willing to compromise and not have both installed. In attempts to bring Top Searches back, I ran Variable Cleanup to cleanup old stuff and cleared my cache. To this day I *still* cannot get top searches reinstalled, reactivated, and have the top Searches block show up. It shows up as an available block to assign to the region. I just cant get it to actually show up again. :/