Spotlight Will Not Search Contents

PowerBook 10.4.9
I have read every thread here and tried every trick listed.
Terminal, Spotless, Disk Utility Verify, Repaired Permissions, Reindexed every way I can think of, deleted Bluetooth phones, Restarted numerous times, put the Home folder into Privacy and then deleted it, Safe Boot and a bunch of other stuff I can't remember.
No matter what I do though Spotlight will only find file names, not content. I have everything in the preferences clicked on to search and have tried numerous combonations of checking and unchecking to no avail.
What is the deal?
Non of the threads on this fix the problem. It just cropped up in the past few days and has stiffled my workflow. Can't search Mail Messages using "Entire Meassage" and can't search for documents based on content.
Will Apple please fix this! Is there some application conflict?

The processes you should see associated with Spotlight are:
mds - the search engine
mdimport - the indexing engine.
-They should both always be there, though they will use 0% CPU until you save a file or run a search.
If mdimport is no longer running, that's your problem. It may be crashing at some point. Do you have any files with a lot of content that it could be getting stuck on?
If can't think of what might be causing it, you can use the Privacy pane to add all then remove one at a time, the folders in your home folder while watching for the mdimport process in Activity Monitor.
To start-and to verify that it is something that can be fixed this way-try first adding the hard drive to the Privacy pane, restart, then open Activity Monitor. Watch Activity Monitor for the mdimport process when you pull the drive out of Privacy.

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