Spotlight's mdworker crashes after FLOP exception

Question

Hi there.
Got some small troubles with Spotlight, my problem is hardly acute, but it has been very painful for me to find. The thing is that I have two folders filled with some extracted application data (from file-ending masked zip files). They contain a few thousand audio and text files plus folders and a bunch of .DS_Store, havn't found anything suspicious. When Spotlight's mdworker tries to index these files it crashes with the following message:
2009-05-21 21.36.36 ReportCrash\[674\] Formulating crash report for process mdworker\[673\]
2009-05-21 21.36.36 com.apple.launchd\[1\] (0x10be10.mdworker\[673\]) Exited abnormally: Floating point exception
2009-05-21 21.36.36 ReportCrash\[674\] Saved crashreport to /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/mdworker2009-05-21-213635XXX.crash using uid: 0 gid: 0, euid: 0 egid: 0
Sometimes the "ReportCrash" part doesn't show up, but otherwise that's what keeps coming up every or every other second.
I currently got the two folders in a non-indexed location to avoid this, but as soon as I move them outside this location spotlight goes haywire. It is, since i found the cause, no longer a very big problem. But I still want to know what might have caused this problem, and I haven't really found any good explanations out there on the net. There doesn't seem to be any apparent errors with the files inside, just that Spotlight doesn't like them or something like that.
Thanks.
P.S.: These are the first few lines from the CrashReport:
Process: mdworker \[673\]
Path: /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/Metadata.framework /Versions/A/Support/mdworker
Identifier: mdworker
Version: ??? (???)
Code Type: X86 (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [1]
Date/Time: 2009-05-21 21:36:35.498 +0200
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.5.7 (9J61)
Report Version: 6
Anonymous UUID: 5B906C94-E104-4B6D-A20E-A2CD5BD8289B
Exception Type: EXC_ARITHMETIC (SIGFPE)
Exception Codes: EXCI386DIV (divide by zero)
Crashed Thread: 1

Answer 1

Hi, and welcome to the forums.
There's clearly something missing or in the wrong place in that/those files. Perhaps something in the originals didn't get compressed properly, or wasn't decompressed right, or with a different package, or on a different OS.
As I understand it, since various types of files have their metadata stored in different places, mdworker looks at what sort of file it is, and calls different "mdimporters" for each type of file. So there are many little things that can go wrong.
I realize that's not much of an answer, and it's probably not worth trying to re-extract them to see if you can manage to re-create them properly.
On the other hand, if you can figure out how to do it with one file, you could probably write an Automator or Applescript app to do it for all of them.