Spotlight crashing on `1` and only `1`
If you don't get the crash on a fresh user account, you might want to force the system to rebuild the Spotlight index:
- From the Apple menu, go to System Preferences
- In System Preferences, select Spotlight, and chose the Privacy tab on the Spotlight screen
- Click the "+" icon at the bottom of the screen and add a folder (any folder) to the list of folders excluded from spotlight
- Once you've added the folder to the list of folders excluded from Spotlight, select that folder from the list
- Click the "-" icon to remove the folder from the list of excluded folders.
- From the System Preferences menu, select Quit.
The change to the excluded folders list should start the (long) process of rebuilding the Spotlight index. I can't promise that this will fix your problem, but it has a good shot at it.
This is a long shot, but it might work.
Spotlight might be crashing because the first document in the results somehow crashes Spotlight when previewed. A way to change that would be to change the results. So…
- Create a folder on your desktop called "1".
- Double click the folder to open it.
- Close the window.
- Try the spotlight search now and see if it crashes
If it doesn't crash, look at (but don't click yet!) the second file in the search results – that might be the one that has been giving you trouble. If spotlight then crashes when you click the second file in the list, that's a good sign that that particular file is the source of your problems.
A couple of thoughts...
First, you might try searching for '1' in a Finder search window. That also uses spotlight, but since the results are presented through the Finder you might get a usable error message that will help you diagnose the problem.
Second, you can try working with the unix spotlight metadata commands, particularly mdfind and mdutil. The first lets you run spotlight queries from the command line, so you may get usable error messages. The second allows you to work with the metadata stores directly, even up to nuking the stores for particular volumes.