My mdimport appears to be perpetually stuck on .DS_Store files, e.g.

mdimport 5882 me 7r VREG 14,2 21508 1354444 /Users/me/Devl/Java/L/GL/.DS_Store

If I delete this .DS_Store, it will find another one and stick there.

But in other respects spotlight seems to be working, though maybe a bit slowly.
"Touch foo/mdls foo" shows the newly created file for example.

So is the earlier statement that

'if "lsof|grep mdimport" shows it indexing a file for a long period, it indicates
something wrong with that file'

really correct? I believe .DS_Store contains some finder options for the
particular folder, and the finder view of that folder does not seem to have
any issues, so I don't have reason to believe that the .DS_Store is corrupted.

I tried all of the hints above but they didn't help. I suspect mds was sticking on a file in the system frameworks directory. (The "grep /Users/`whoami` hides these.)

So I took the simple sledgehammer approach. I shutdown the system and rebooted. Problem solved!