Spotlight has hung

spotlight has an endless spinning wheel.  Is there any way to restart spotlight?

Try going into System Preferences, Spotlight, Privacy and adding the drive to the list and then removing it from the list.  This should cause it to start reindexing to create an entirely new index.
Alternatively , in terminal type (cut/paste):
sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/name-of-disk-to-reindex
Answer the prompt for your admin password (it won't be echoed) and hit return.
I'm assuming spotlight was updating its indices and got hung up somehow so that starting from scratch will give you a better chance of it completing.

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