Since updating to Snow Leopard upon its release I've been struggling with my Entourage 2008 Spotlight searching. I have two accounts and one seemed fine and the other wasn't working at all.
First port of call was to try and rebuild my index. So within Entourage you go to Preferences and Spotlight and click the Rebuild button. Nothing happened. I tried turning off the Spotlight search and re-enabling that. That didn't work either.
Next I got a little more drastic and went in and removed the index stubs that Entourage creates for Spotlight to search, then I disabled Spotlight search in Entourage (as above) and re-enabled it. Theoretically this should have forced Entourage to recreate the stubs, but that didn't occur.
Clearly this was some kind of crazy process issue. I then went into the Microsoft Office 2008 folder and launched the Sync app just to make sure it was running - nothing.
Finally I put the stubs back and tried to launch the import again using mdimport -r on the ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Microsoft/Entourage/2008 folder. It chucked up an error which was interesting. The error said I should force the import again using "arch -i386 mdimport". I did that and it seemed to run successfully - I could here the Macbook disk churning like mad.
A few minutes later my Spotlight search was working on both accounts and updating itself nicely.
It would appear that there's something askew with the preferred mdimport (metadata import) in Snow Leopard defaulting to the 64-bit version and this not working well with Entourage which is of course 32-bit. Once I forced the 32-bit version of mdimport, everything seemed good again.
If it acts up again after a reboot I'll update this post, but ensuring the 32-bit mdimport runs on your Entourage index seems to sort the issue.
