[Christopera]

For some reason spotlight stopped working. I have opened the preferences countless times and all search option are checked. I have tried searching things as simple as "photo booth" with no results found.

Any Ideas?

[Simon]

Go to Activity Monitor and force quit the SystemUIServer process.

If that doesn't do the trick, try adding your HD to Spotlight's ignore list and saving that. Then open the Spotlight pref again and remove your HD form the list. Will it search now?

[mintcake]

Thanks for this Simon. I'd been having the same problem since an archive and install. Spotlight wasn't identifying certain apps. Quitting SystemUIServer didn't solve it, but adding and then removing the Applications folder from Spotlight's ignore list forced a rescan and fixed the problem. Ta.

[Macadvo]

Spotlight does the same to me constantly. Works fine for a while then all of a sudden it stops finding anything, and I mean anything, nothing comes up when I search. It's a complete PITA. Apple please fix this in Leopard.

[EDIT] Hey quitting the SystemUIserver process really works! Why is this? What causes this problem? [/EDIT]

[Simon]

Because it's not really that Spotlight's not working anymore, but simply its GUI is refusing to take input and display output. Restarting SystemUIServer resets the Spotlight GUI.