Spotlight (in OS X 10.5.5) doesn't index photos in iPhoto '08

In OS X 10.4.11 I used to be able to search for photos using Spotlight. If a comment of a photo in iPhoto '08 contained the string I specified, Spotlight displayed the photo in the list of hits. This doesn't seem to be working in OS X 10.5.5. I have tried reindexing my whole harddisk as well as reindexing just my Pictures folder. I have also tried mdimport from the command line, which claims to have imported the iPhoto Library.
Background information. The iPhoto library was created with iPhoto '08 on Tiger 10.4.11. I installed Leopard new, upgraded it to 10.5.4, installed iLife 08 new, then copied a backup of my iPhoto Library to my Pictures folder.

No upgrade, clean install. I made a bootable copy of the MBP's harddisk using SuperDuper, then reformatted it and installed 10.5 clean. Only after performing all the updates did I then install applications and application updates, which I configured manually. So, on the system and application level, this should be a pure Leopard installation. The only things I copied were application data, incl. the iPhoto Library which, as we know, is more a folder than a file. So if there was anything in it that was Tiger-specific, that would be a problem, although one wouldn't expect that to be the case.
* Breaking News * Beside this MBP I have a MB running 10.5.5 and iPhoto 08. It was upgraded from 10.4.11 in the same way as the MBP, i.e., clean install of Leopard and applications, after which application data was copied from a backup. Surprisingly, I was able to search for photos with Spotlight based on the comments that I supplied; however, when I added a new comment to a photo, Spotlight didn't find the photo. So I forced it to reindex my Pictures folder. Now it doesn't even find the photos that it used to. I am tempted to conclude that something is broken in 10.5.5 that wasn't in some previous version of Leopard.

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