Spotlight (still) not working in System Preferences

Hi there,
As soon as I enter a single letter in the search box of the System Preferences window, the entire System Preferences window dims, and no Preference Pane icon is highlighted.
I've tried:
1) Running Disk Utility and reparing disk -- no repairs required
2) Running Disk Utility and repairing permissions -- no repairs required
3) Booting into Single User Mode (Command-S at boot), and running AppleJack 1.4.3 and removing all caches and checking all plist files for corruption
4) Deleting the Spotlight index: sudo mdutil -E / and re-indexing
5) manually deleting just ~/Library/com.apple.preferencepanes.cache and
~/Library/com.apple.preferencepanes.searchindexcache
Except for the search field in the System Prefernences window not working, Spotlight seems fine.
Any other suggestions appreciated.
...b

Thank you Daniel,
I omitted posting that the Search box in my Systems Preferences Window used to work, so that I do know what to look for: as I type letters the preference panes whose description contains the (partial) word I am typing should be highlighted by an undimmed circle.
Unfortunately, in my case, the behavior I have is that regardless of what I type in the Search box in my Systems Prefernces Window, no icons are ever highlighted. Indeed, I can type the complete name of a preference pane, for example 'bluetooth', and while my entire Systems Preferences Window is dimmed, neither my Bluetooth preference pane icon nor any other preference pane icon is highlighted through the use of an undimmed circle about it.
This failure of the Search box in the Systems Preferences Window has been experienced by other people. For example in this forum, viz:
Reindexed my HD but no Spotlight preference in Preferences
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=876847
Unfortunately the solution posted in the above thread was to manually delete the ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.cache and ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.searchindexcache files. And as I posted I've tried not only manually deleting the above two files in terminal.app, but also deleting all of my cache files through the use AppleJack 1.4.3. Neither steps have returned the Search box in my Systems Preferences Window to working order.
Alas, I'm still looking for suggestions...

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Thank you Daniel,
I omitted posting that the Search box in my Systems Preferences Window used to work, so that I do know what to look for: as I type letters the preference panes whose description contains the (partial) word I am typing should be highlighted by an undimmed circle.
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http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=876847
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