turning off spotlight - you cant - this really was dumb.

who wants gigabytes of video files searched....

i note a post on another website:

A poster on the Apple discussion boards says that it "looks like indexing can be turned off by setting SPOTLIGHT=-NO- in /etc/hostconfig. The mdimportserver then will not launch any more at system start."
http://www.macintouch.com/tiger05.html

so there you go.
this would have been easier in the gui...