Spotlight - MDS - Crashing over and over

Question

A few days ago I did a Spotlight search and it froze. Since then my Mac has been Windows unstable. Mail crashes some times, Excel others times, Console, Activity Monitor, Safari, WebKit, iPhoto - all crash now. MDS is running almost constantly and crashes over and over - never finishes. In fact in Console I currently have 27 mds crash logs, 14 in the last hour. The computer is becoming unusable. Oh, no APE etc...
Steps I have taken:
Repair Permissions, verify disk, repair disk, CCCed to a new disk, REinstalled 10.5.4 combo, rerepaired disk, etc. And before I did all the mutil /E type "stuff".
Net net; mds is running and crashing over and over. This seems to be causing other apps to crash as well. Other oddity - most of the time when an application crashes, it does not quit/shutdown - it just is hung in the Not Responding state. Multiple ReportCrash processes will run but never complete and cannot be quit or forced quit - including sudo kill -9. Then the Not Responding application cannot be killed off either and the system will not shutdown - requires hard stop on power.
If this were a DELL I would understand. But this is a Quad Core G5 Mac running 10.5.4 and 4.5 gigs of Apple RAM.
Note - just while writing this, I have 5 more mds crash logs - of of which refer to a KERNPROTECTIONFAILURE and EXCBADACCESS.
Ideas?

Answer 1

Hi Ashler, I think baltwo is right, and you need to reinstall the OS (Archive & Install) because your Spotlight system is "hosed". If you read about the A&I first and perhaps print or write the steps out (very simple, really), I think you will be pleasantly surprised by how easy Apple has made the process. It's nothing as bad as doing a Windows re-install.
But first, we should try to think of the reason for the problem. Have you been running anything that tries to duplicate or otherwise modify the behaviour of Spotlight? In my experience, I have found that everything from Google Desktop to Microsoft Office 2008 have caused Spotlight/indexing/MDS problems on Macs recently. A Spotlight plugin (like any of the .mdimporter plugins from Office, for example) could cause problems; or perhaps Google Desktop's efforts to duplicate Spotlight's services. Or perhaps any other bit of software.
In any case, BEFORE you do the Archive & Install, be sure to go through your main root Library and also your user home Library, and look for items that might be running and causing problems. Also, use Activity Monitor to show all processes and see if there's an app running at startup or login. Then disable the things that might be the cause. Somehow, try to make sure that whatever has got jammed in your system is not going to get transferred by the Archive & Install and end up doing the same thing again when you are done. Try removing the Privacy Spotlight settings and then running from a fresh newly created user account to see if the problem lies with the System as a whole, or just within your own user home folder.
Let us know how you do. Good luck anyway - your Archive & Install will fix you right up.