Spotlight issue - Finder comments dont seem to be updated

Hi,
trying to classify files using spotlight comments in the Finder (after Cmd-i; also via AppleScript) but it's hit&miss. Usually (not always) adding a comment works and a search finds it immediately, but sometimes it does not. The other way is worse: removing a comment very often is not taken into account at all - the file remains in the respective Saved Search, even though Cmd-i shows that the comment is gone.
Some more datapoints:
- reindexing helps; mdutil -E <VolumeName>, wait 30min, and then everything is fine (...this is a bit of a Windows solution...)
- mdls has the wrong information, ie even if the comment is gone from the file it still is in mdls (...which makes sense I guess; this is why the search still finds it...)
- mdimport -d 2 <filename> shows that the correct comment (eg no comment, or a changed comment) has been read, it is just ignored (ie subsequent mdls shows the old comment)
I guess this is a bug, so I can really only hope Apple will fix it - but does someone know a workaround that would force spotlight to import all data? I guess it is one of the Apple optimisation tricks- OSX thinks it knows better....

what always helps for me is to run from a terminal
mdutil -E /Volumes/Volumename
which rebuilds the index (Volumename is the name of a mounted encrypted sparsebundle) --- but this is slow
what sometimes helps is to eject / remount the disk, but no clear solution yet
Oh, and by the way: on a 1GB drive (mainly pdfs) my freshly indexed spotlight is 100MB, but after a week or so it grows to 900MB...)

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Mark
Welcome to the Apple Discussions.
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Spotlight issue - Finder comments dont seem to be updated

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