Spotlight icon missing and permissions gone crazy!

[vwl]

Hi there,

My MBP has been behaving very strangely lately. I had real problems with permissions last week and I'm not convinced that it has been repaired properly. When I go to repair permissions, the time meter says it will take 10 hours to complete. There are literally hundreds of lines of "ACL found but not expected on.....". Repairing permissions after 10 hours does not fix this. Can anyone shed some light on what these messages mean? I suspect my permissions globally on the whole machine have gone crazy because I can't even click and drag photos in iPhoto into folders. Help please!


Second thing - my spotlight icon has disappeared from the right hand top corner. I've googled this and some people have fixed this by running spotlight in Core Services folder. Strange thing is that my Core Services folder has gone missing. Can anyone tell me how I can replace this??


Should I just do an archive and install of 10.5??