Spotlight completely broken even after troubleshooting

Ok , i must say i HATE Spotlight. I always have, mainly because it never has worked fast enough for me, and has been problematic since day one.
Having said that I am still forced to use it to find things on my system but now it's completely broken. When I type in the Spotlight window, it hangs even after the first letter, like it usually does, but now it has added a new trick in that it refuses to find anything at all.
Fine. I'll force OSX to rebuild the database.
Go into terminal, type in the appropriate command that 100 billion posts in discussion say to do, and I get nothing. It does nothing. No rebuild. Nothing. I check Activity monitor to see if it's working. Nothing. This is also after I've trashed the prefs and Spotlight refuses to even build a new prefs file.
So, I go to System prefs, open the Spotlight tab, and try to drag my volume to the privacy window to get it to dump the dbase. The volume never shows up. Try adding it using the button. Nothing.
I trashed the Finder prefs too, and at least that fixed the problem with Finder locking up every time I did a Get Info on a file, but didn't help Spotlight at all.
One other minor good thing is, once I trashed the Spotlight prefs, at least now my system will reboot in under 5 minutes time, since I'm sure that Spotlight was the cause of that problem as well.
Dear Apple. Spotlight *****. In the meantime can someone offer other suggestions BESIDES reinstalling Tiger. Thanks.

Bryan,
I don't know about you but re-installing the entire OS should only be a desperate last measure. I haven't done it in years, and hope never to have to, since it would require at least a full day of my time, what with finding all the upgrades (on a dialup connection !!!), installing them, and then re- inputting all my data into the various places where it's needed. And yet that's what we now regularly find TIger users advised to do, just because of one dumb thing: Spotlight. And even if you DO go down this route and re-install Tiger, it's a sure bet something will go wrong again with Spotlight anyway.
ONe of the simplest, quickest things any computer user needs to do is find a file, any file, fast, and then get on with whatever it was they needed the file for. Apple seems to think we find the process so fascinating that we could spend the whole day doing it.
Try Easyfind instead of Spotlight. It's far from ideal but as things stand with the Mac OS, it's the only way to find your files.
You can download it from here
http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/index.html
Oh, BTW, did you know that in a desperate attempt to make Spotlight work, Apple decided that it won't index everything?
I hope Easyfind makes your life a little better
12" PowerBook G4, G4 450 DP tower Mac OS X (10.3.9) on the Powerbook, and 10.4.2 on the G4 450
12" PowerBook G4, G4 450 DP tower Mac OS X (10.3.9) on the Powerbook, and 10.4.2 on the G4 450
12" PowerBook G4, G4 450 DP tower Mac OS X (10.3.9) on the Powerbook, and 10.4.2 on the G4 450

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*http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_data_to_a_new_profile_-_Firefox

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