I disabled Spotlight and its Metadata Framework in OS X 10.5 by moving two files to a safe location that they can be restored from if necessary. The files are: /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist You then need to reboot so that launchd will no longer start them. Since these are in /System/Library, you will need to check after every update to insure that Apple has not added them back in. I am not positive of all the implications of this, but it does stop the indexing of every volume that I mount, and Spotlight does not show up in the menu bar. In 10.5, there is no spotlight entry in /etc/hostconfig, and there is a note there that states that this file will be going away in the future. [robg adds ...

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