Spotlight mdworker has been spinning for three days

Three days ago I noticed that my Macbook's fans were running and the computer felt hot. Activity Monitor showed that the mdworker process was taking >95% of CPU. I figured it would go away, but after a day...and another day...and another, it never corrected. I force quit it on the second day, but as soon as the process restarted the problem reoccurred. I've gotten sick of it and feared for my computer's fan, so I just turned of spotlight indexing in the terminal a few minutes ago.
Anyone have any suggestions? I've looked through the log files and I see a lot of denials of read access to various files, like this:
3/18/14 7:29:24.838 PM sandboxd[315]: ([81626]) mdworker(81626) deny file-read-data /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/Media/Clipart/ Animals.localized/.localized ()
3/18/14 7:29:25.000 PM kernel[0]: Sandbox: mdworker(81626) deny file-read-data /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/Media/Clipart/ Animals.localized/.localized
But I don't see how that would cause this problem to occur. I also see the following lines:
3/18/14 11:09:41.514 PM mdworker32[82296]: CGSConnectionByID: 0 is not a valid connection ID.
3/18/14 11:09:41.515 PM mdworker32[82296]: CGSGetSpaceManagementMode: No connection with id 0x       0
3/18/14 11:11:09.499 PM mdworker32[82298]: CGSConnectionByID: 0 is not a valid connection ID.
3/18/14 11:11:09.499 PM mdworker32[82298]: CGSGetSpaceManagementMode: No connection with id 0x       0
3/18/14 11:23:23.996 PM mdworker32[82350]: CGSConnectionByID: 0 is not a valid connection ID.
3/18/14 11:23:23.997 PM mdworker32[82350]: CGSGetSpaceManagementMode: No connection with id 0x       0
No idea about those.
For now, I have no spotlight. Any suggestions as to how to try to resolve this problem would be appreciated.

I'm posting the resolution to the problem in case anyone else stumbles onto this thread:
Some combination of what I did worked. In retrospect I wish that I had tried things one at a time to narrow down the cause, but I really just wanted things working! Here's what I did:
1. Turned spotlight off in the terminal (sudo mdutil -a -i off)
2. Fixed permissions
3. Removed all .mdimporter files from /Library/Spotlight, /System/Library/Spotlight, and ~/Library/Spotlight
4. Turned spotlight back on for my primary volume (sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/Dune) (Where "Dune" is the name of the primary volume on my hard drive.)
5. Removed indexes as per baltwo's suggestion (sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/Dune). Note that you cannot remove indexes if spotlight is turned off.
So now I'll add the .mdimporter files back in one at a time and see if the problem reoccurs, and if that works then I'll turn spotlight back on for my various backup volumes too.
If I ever narrow down the problem I'll post it here. Incidentally, my console still shows the same error messages occuring now, so those denials of read access seem irrelevant. My computer at work had the CGS error messages and it works fine, so neither seems to be indicative of any problem in and of themselves.

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