I believe sherlock is now indexing because the blue horizontal bar at the bottom has moved 3/4" and the time says 3 hours. I've also done iPhoto work. I think the other day I did something that stopped the process.

Sherlock went back to 'Calculating Time' (the attachment) for a couple of hours. I let an hour go by, I opened Sherlock, and it showed it's regular window. I didn't make a search. It must have been like that for an hour, because just now I opened it and it's back to 'Calculating Time'.

The plain sherlock window is there. I put in a search word, and the same multiple files appeared. Nothing's changed. What do you think I should do? the rest of the computer is working fine.

Did you do any filesystem repair ? (as recommended in posts 8 & 17)

By the way, why do you refer to the search as "Sherlock" ?
That is the name of the older search utility in pre-Panther (I think) versions of OS X.
Does the word "Sherlock" appear anywhere on the user-interface?

I have Disk Repair in OS X. I don't have Disk Warrior. I'll read the article. I'll rund Disk Repair. Sherlock? From old habit. Besides, I think it's a better name, /and/ I'm a fan of him and Dr. Watson.

> there was no change in the problem of multiple duplicates.

Then either there are dupes laying around, and you just don't know it.

Or, maybe there are directory errors creeping into the index.
Why you haven't responded to anyone's suggestion about running
a disk repair utility is beyond me. (oops sorry; missed page 2).

I also mentioned mdimporter files. Did you look in those
folders? Was there anything in them worth mentioning?
I wonder if multiple mdimporter files could produce this?

[By the way, when I go from this page 2 of the posts, back to page 1, then return to 2, I lose what I've written. No big deal. I've copied the text.]

There's no way I would ever made that many duplicates. Absolutely. No way.

"maybe there are directory errors creeping into the index."
I don't know what this means.

"Or possibly there's some flakey 3rd-party
Metadata importer (.mdimporter) file in either the global library,
or a user library:"

/Library/Spotlight
/Users/*/Library/Spotlight"

I did overlook this, not quite understanding it. Why, within one of my Mac libraries, would there be "some /flakey/ third party Metadata ... "? Flakey?

What do I /do/ when going into /Library/Spotlight
/Users/*/Library/Spotlight?

"...volume is just too full (or fragmented, or both)."

Don't know what this means either, but I do know that my computer—most of the programs—are running slower than common. For instance, in closing a screen in any window, the red button, there's no instantaneous closing. Takes a bit of time. Annoying. Also in all programs, it's hard to get the cursor only in place, between two letters of a word, for instance. What happens is either the whole word is selected, or a whole paragraph. Have to go slowly to get the cursor to stay without select appearing.
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Hal Itosis, coming back to your post just now, I think part of it got cut off. The post ends with, "I wonder if multiple mdimporter files could produce this?" For instance the part, "... some /flakey/ third party Metadata ... " has disappeared.

I'll go through all your suggestions. May take some time due to my other work.

Thanks for your patience.

Now is probably the time to restart you computer from your restore DVD and run Disk Utility on your harddrive. It really sounds like some file system corruption.

I've go the same Problem: Every contact in my address book shows up twice in the spotlight-search-results. I've tried everything: re-indexing, booting from install disk and checking the startvolume. The duplicates stay. Any other idea?

Command-click each result to bring up the source of the result. I'm betting that one is from your Address Book and the other is a card from your Dot-Mac attachments folder.

If it turns out they are from the same source, run 'Disk Repair' from the Utilities menu after booting your OS X DVD. This is a sign of a corrupt directory structure.

No – one result leads to the Adressbook, the other one to no folder or application at all.:confused:

I already did this – run disk repair from the OSX DVD twice – without any effect. The duplicates stay where they are.:(