Lion upgrade: Spotlight query trouble

Question

I upgraded to Lion this morning on my mid-2009 4Gb RAM MacBook Pro. Whenever I type something into Spotlight now, on the second keystroke it freezes, then all the icons to the left of spotlight disappear, blink and then return. I can't do a spotlight search :-(
I tried resetting the index with mdutil. It got rebuilt. I still have the problem.
I now notice I seem to be too late to write the Lion download to DVD. How can I reinstall cleanly now?

Answer 1

Thanks. Well it seems on the french app store it is currently impossible to re-download lion :-( Telephone support person said it should be soon possible. She advised me to reinstall by rebooting and hit [Command] [R] on startup. We'll see!
When spotlight crashes I am seeing this error in the console:
Process:         SystemUIServer [1007]
Path:            /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemUIServer.app/Contents/MacOS/SystemUIServer
Identifier:      com.apple.systemuiserver
Version:         1.7 (352)
Build Info:      SystemUIServer-352000000000000~7
Code Type:       X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process:  launchd [140]
Date/Time:       2011-08-05 16:23:23.880 +0200
OS Version:      Mac OS X 10.7 (11A511)
Report Version:  9
Crashed Thread:  6  Dispatch queue: com.apple.root.default-priority
Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000020
VM Regions Near 0x20:
-->
    __TEXT                 0000000101bc7000-0000000101c2a000 [  396K] r-x/rwx SM=COW  /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemUIServer.app/Contents/MacOS/SystemUIServer
Application Specific Information:
com.apple.syncservices.sync_menu
com.apple.menuextra.bluetooth
com.apple.menuextra.TimeMachine
com.apple.menuextra.airport
com.apple.scriptmenu
com.apple.menuextra.displays
com.apple.menuextra.volume
com.apple.menuextra.battery
com.apple.menuextra.textinput
com.apple.menuextra.clock
com.apple.menuextra.appleuser
objc[1007]: garbage collection is OFF
Thread 0:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
0   libsystem_kernel.dylib                  0x00007fff8657c67a mach_msg_trap + 10
1   libsystem_kernel.dylib                  0x00007fff8657bd71 mach_msg + 73
2   com.apple.CoreGraphics                  0x00007fff8db900b2 _CGSSynchronizeWindowBackingStore + 148