While you're right about Spotlight's indexing slowing down the system, you're complaining about a feature that actually helps improve search so that's not a "problem" with the system.
What Apple should do is allow people to choose when they want Spotlight to index such as choosing it to do it overnight or during sleep mode so people can get work done without any slow downs.
I disagree. In Snow Leopard (SL), the same function did not result in this atrocious behaviour. Re-indexing the whole disk repeatedly is indicative of
some kind of problem, either with the disk's spotlight index (which did work on SL), or with the Mav's implementation of Spotlight. Besides, after the first index is complete, indexing during use
should take mere seconds (or microseconds), as files are created or edited (unless you're routinely dealing with adding/modifying very many files). Unfortunately for me, Mav's seems to want to rebuild the index on this disk again and again...
robgendreau, I'll try adding it to the exclude list. That'll temporarily stop it trying to index. Will that also
remove an existing spotlight index? That way I could be sure that any index it built subsequently was at least not damaged in some way... Anyway, I'll have a look at rebuilding the Spotlight index with Terminal, I'm sure I've seen that sort of thing plenty of times before on the 'net.
Cheers folks.