OSX Spotlight: on or off, never dim

I have had intermittent problems with spotlight on my macbook pro. Sometimes it would find stuff, sometimes it finds absolutely nothing. Here's the problem and the solution..

As with most unintended features, I searched the appropriate message boards and spotlight not working in google. Others seem to be having the same sorts of issues. The most common solution out there is to manually force spotlight to re-index the hard drive (then reboot). So I rebuilt the index a couple of times (via the command line and via the hide/unhide way) but to no avail. Spotlight would work for a few days beautifully, then not at all-- feast or famine.

Here's how I can reproduce the problem 100% of the time:

1. turn on mbp
2. login in as quickly as possible
3. access spotlight entry dialog as quickly as possible. I either click on the icon or use command + space as soon as it's visible.
4. search for something

If you perform the preceeding steps, spotlight will not find anything at all until you:

1. reboot the pc
2. login
3. wait a bit (how long detailed below)
4. access spotlight

OR

1. logout the current user
2. log back in

The way I can tell for sure how long to wait (after reboot) is by accessing the spotlight preferences | privacy tab. When the folders that I have prevented spotlight from searching appear (I have some and they don't show for a few seconds).. everything has been initialized and spotlight will work as designed.

So it appears there is some kind of race condition going on. Users are allowed to access the UI before the backend has been fully initialized. I submitted a bug report to apple but who knows if they even read them?