Spotlight "window" missing

After a system crash, attempting to use Spotlight results in a blue background behind the Spotlight icon in the menu bar, but no entry area appears.
However, every time I invoke Spotlight (CMD+Spacebar), the following message appears in the syslog:
SystemUIServer[190]: -[MDMenuWindow _checkTopRight] the window is off the screen topRight point is {0, 1028}
Any idea how I can recover this window to a visible position on my screen?  I've tried using the Display object from the system preferences to "Gather Windows" to the primary display (didn't work); I tried using Finder to "Bring All to Front".
Note that the entry area IS active, if I hit CMD+Spacebar and type an application name, that application is launched. However, the display area normally displayed when using spotlight for searching is missing in action in addition to the entry area.

Yes there is a hack to get it to appear, but it is buggy as all get out--which is undoubtedly why it didn't get turned on. Evidently finding out why it ain't working is not a priority, so it still hasn't been enabled in the OS updates (I would guess it is not likely it ever will be fixed). See this old MacOSXHints tip:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2009083113534843
For little more information, including some screen captures, see my article here:
http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/mods.html
Its about half way down the page, in the section on "Brute Force Edit of the Plist"--did I mention it is really buggy?
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

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