Spotlight on G5 spotlighting every day for hours

Question

hi all,
I have installed Leopard 10.5.3 on my G5 2.3 dual (4 FW disks attached on it) and since then Spotlight searches for files every day for hours, on all disks, internal and external;
I really don't know what SL is looking for and why these searches are endless,
but it's so frustrating when I need to find a file because SLing is not available during its search;
I have the same problem with my MBP 15" Penryn 2.4GHz but only when external disks are on;
has anybody out there any idea about that? I wonder, is that normal function?
thanks for helping_

Answer 1

What malware was found by ClamXav? Most likely, it was Windows malware. Also, unfortunately, most likely it was Windows malware attached to e-mail messages, in which case deleting it from ClamXav probably corrupted one or more of your mailboxes. Assuming you're using Mail, you should probably rebuild all your mailboxes, by selecting each one, one at a time, and using the Rebuild command in the Mailbox menu on each.
Regarding Mac malware, you most likely have nothing to fear. There isn't much malware out there for Macs, and all of it is very rare. Of course, if you're actually using Mac OS X 10.5.8, as your profile indicates, you have fewer defenses than users of more up-to-date systems. For more on this topic, see my Mac Malware Guide.
As to the downloads, there are many things that could account for that. Jon P D gave a couple excellent possibilities. Regarding the wifi, if you're using a wifi router to create a network without a password, or with weak WEP encryption, you could easily have someone piggybacking on your wifi and using your bandwidth without permission. Lock down the network with WPA2 encryption and a good, strong password that people won't be able to guess.
Also, note that Mac OS X downloads updates automatically in the background, and there were a number of large updates this week. If you have a connection that only allows you to download a certain amount per month, you may want to turn that option off in System Preferences -> Software Update, so that you can choose when new updates are downloaded.