turning off spotlight - you cant - this really was dumb.
who wants gigabytes of video files searched....
i note a post on another website:
http://www.macintouch.com/tiger05.htmlA 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."
so there you go.
this would have been easier in the gui...