Spotlight Not Working on Menu Bar?

[sav2880]

I am having an issue I've solved before, but I don't remember how I did, so I'm calling out smarter people.

On my iBook G3 with Tiger, Spotlight is working, and I have Shift-F8 set to bring up the full spotlight search. However, when I hit F8, the key I have bound to just a menu bar search, the magnifying glass turns blue as if selected, but a text box never drops down to allow me to search from the menu bar.

The searches itself work just fine when I bring out the full dialog box.

Has anyone else ever experienced this error, and how did you fix it?

Thanks!

 

[gdbjr]

I have had this happen to me before as well. I searched all over the web trying to find a fix. One suggestion was to delete the spotlight index files and have the system reindex your entire machine. DON'T DO THIS. It doesn't fix the problem (nor does it really break anything), it just takes forever to reindex everything. First I would try to delete the spotlight plist file located in your homedirectory/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlight.plist

I think that is what fixed it for me. If not, it won't break anything either, but if you want to be safe you can back up that file to a different directory instead of deleting it.