Spotlight search cannot begin with "a"

Question

If I type a search in the Spotlight field which begins with "a" (or is simply that single letter), the progress icon (rotating lines) never stops spinning, and the mds process eats up all available physical memory, as well as writing gigabytes worth of bogus data to disk as virtual memory.
Pressing "esc" to clear the text entered causes the mds process to return to normal.
For example, if I type "activity" (looking for activity monitor) into the Spotlight search field, the lines will spin indefinitely and mds will do what I describe above. *However, typing "bactivity" and then using arrow keys to delete the starting 'b', leaving "activity" in the search field, gives a NORMAL search where the rotating lines disappear and correct results are given, with no mds problems.*
Words starting with any letter other than 'a' return normal search results and do not cause mds to spiral out of control.
What on earth might be causing this? (I have rebuilt the Spotlight index twice already, to no avail.)

Answer 1

Glad to know I'm not the only one!
Now I am only having the 'a' problem intermittently.
I tried doing two things... (bad science, I know, as now I'm not sure which one actually helped).
1.) I changed the permissions of the Applications folder (/Applications). For some reason my account didn't have read+write permissions on that folder. I added myself as having read/write permissions. Check using cmd-i on the folder in finder, at the bottom -- "sharing and permissions".
2.) I reindexed my Applications folder by adding it to the Spotlight exclude list, then removing it from that list (and then rebooted).