Spotlight sees comments created in =10.5 but does not show them in Comments

Question

*A most serious and perplexing situation*: Upon updating to 10.6 my huge number of file comments created in the Comments field in 10.5 and earlier OS X versions are reliably detected/indexed by Spotlight 10.6 but are _not displayed_ in its Comments field!?!
Reindexing, an obvious solution step, has not solved the problem. I have also run TechTool Pro 5.0.6 and DiskWarrior 4.2 (though both off the startup disk), to no avail.
Does anyone have a suggestion as to a utility that could make the comments reappear in Comments?
Or is there at the very least a utility that should give one a view of the pre-existing metadata (wherever it may be stored?!#!) so that one can copy or retype it into the (10.6) Comments field??
Any feedback would be most highly appreciated.

Answer 1

I'm not sure. spotlight comments are tricky animals. they are stored in several places: in the extended attributes of the file, in .DS_store of the folder containing it and in the spotlight index. I think one of the first two locations is corrupted somehow. also, the fact that you are moving from older OS X versions complicates matters. AFAIK, the system for storing them changed from Tiger to leopard.
try the following. open AppleScript Editor (It's in /Applications/Utilities and paste in the following.
<pre style="
font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;
font-size: 10px;
margin: 0px;
padding: 5px;
border: 1px solid #000000;
width: 720px;
color: #000000;
background-color: #ADD8E6;
overflow: auto;"
title="this text can be pasted into the Script Editor">
tell application "Finder"
set mlist to selection
repeat with this_item in mlist
set ppath to quoted form of POSIX path of (this_item as alias)
set comment of this_item to (do shell script "mdls -name kMDItemFinderComment " & ppath & "| awk -F\\\"  '{print $2}'")
end repeat
end tell</pre>
select a few files/folders that are giving you trouble with spotlight comments in finder and press "run" in applescript editor. then see if the spotlight comments for those files got fixed.