JOSEPH SQUIRE  To disable Spotlight indexing on the main volume, do "sudo mdutil -i off /" in Terminal. To disable Spotlight on other volumes, do "sudo mdutil -i off ". You'll obviously need root access to do this. There are probably GUI tools to do the same thing, but I did it on my system from Terminal. You'll probably want to get rid of everything in the "Privacy" tab of the Spotlight system preference so you can at least search files by filename in the Finder. I've done all this and I'm happier with Spotlight disabled like this.  
(Version 4.0.1)