Some banks are withholding payments to car dealers pending a resolution of the problems with search functions on the new Personal Property Securities Register. These continued into the second day of operation yesterday.Other commercial transactions are also being affected, such as the sale of new and second-hand cars where the buyer wants to trade in their existing car (this is around half of all car sales).More valuable transactions may also be affected. One investment bank manager posted on Twitter yesterday that "we have several deals pending. This is delaying settlement". He added that "theoretically we have 1000s of unsecure deals".Updates posted by the Attorney-General's Department on the PPSR website yesterday referred to issues with "the access and responsiveness of the register".As with the first day of use of the new register, the problems relate to search functions. Registrations of new securities are taking place satisfactorily.The availability and reliability of search functions appears to have fluctuated during the day. Issues with the consistency of data migrated from ASIC's register of company charges, including the absence of Australian Company Numbers from many records, was another common complaint. Other issues - such as the production of "search certificates" - appear to be even more pervasive, though accounts of this vary.The AG's Department (which did not want to respond to questions yesterday) noted some operational highlights of the PPSR website. These included the production of more than 25,000 verification statements.The PPSRcheX blog of service provider GlobalX noted that "a search certificate is not produced on every occasion".Banks sources suggest that this problem with search certificates is common.For some lenders the availability of such certificates is required in order to make payments to dealers for vehicles (or other goods) bought under finance. Private buyers of cars have also experienced reduced access to data. For instance, the Carhistory.com.au service of Veda Advantage remained offline yesterday.The AG's Department cited other highlights of the PPSR website. These included more than 17,000 new registrations of securities and the creation of 2500 user accounts since the register opened for business early on Monday.