Spotlight on my iMac running snow leopard will not stop indexing the hard drive. How can I stop this?

Spotlight on my iMac (OSX 10.6.8) has suddenly begun indexing the hard drive non-stop, causing very sluggish operation and spinning beach balls. Reinstalling the operating system has not helped, nor has repairing permissions or the disk.

One of the first things that happens when installing a new version of OS X is that the Spotlight search app is setup to index all available hard drives.
The indexing makes it faster and easier for the Spotlight Search app to find things on and off your Mac.
You can either let it take the time it needs to do this (Spotlight will only do this one time, initially) OR if you just can't or want to wait for this to complete, you need to go into OS X System Prefences panel in the OS X Dock, locate the Spotlight icon.
Click the Spitlight icon and another set of menus appear.
Find the menu item dealing the Spotlight indexing and uncheck its checkbox to disable Spotlight indexing.

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