IMPORTANT NOTE TO EVERYONE!

I too HATE the way spotlight works. In the old OS9 days (man I sound old!), you did a search for a file named "Budget" and your budget would show up in seconds. Now, you do a search for budget and about 10,000 files show up including emails, images, pdfs... grrrrr.

On top of that, once I upgraded to 10.5 on my MBP(Intel), my computer was crashing constantly - I felt it had something to do with the indexing that never completed.

On top of that, how many times do you hit command-space accidently and get stuck in that stupid magnifying glass window! GRRRRR. Can't get rid of that!

So, I visited this page and disabled spotlight and sure enough, the crashing stopped. YEY!

However, the important thing to note is that disabling spotlight DISABLES ALL SEARCHING on your computer. For some reason, I thought hitting Command-F was different than spotlight but they are all the same.

What a bummer! Sure the search function sucked but being without it for months now, I'm tired of having files I just can't find due to poor organization.

So, to re-enable Spotlight, nothing was working until I did these two commands in terminal:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist

Now, previously, in an attempt to get spotlight working, I changed:

SPOTLIGHT=-NO-
to
SPOTLIGHT=-YES-

in /etc/hostconfig (for confused, the command is just "pico /etc/hostconfig" - the control commands to save/close etc are at the bottom of pico)

I'm not 100% sure if that is necessary or if doing the other two command would update hostconfig but Spotlight is back! Yey!... I mean... well... fabulous [SARCASM]

Enjoy!
-scott

Though I don't like spotlight and I don't want it in my menu bar, I had to re-enable it because Microsoft Entourage's search function is build on spotlight and I need to be able to search my emails.

I found that the above commands worked to re-enable it, however when I first tried to run them, I go the error message "dubious ownership". After some search around, I figured that when I moved the file from the original directories, the ownership got changed. To fix it, I had to enter the command:

sudo chown root:wheel [file path]