help!Spotlight will not search. deleting plist does not work

I've been having a problem with spotlight. When I click the icon on the menu bar and type something such as iDVD, spotlight doesn't react. It acts as if I haven't typed anything. Then i click the desktop, the spotlight window closes. I click the spotlight icon again and then it starts searching for iDVD. I've tried deleting the file "com.apple.spotlight.plist" located in the preferences directory of my user account library. This did not help. I also tried setting "macintosh hd" to private and then back to normal to force it to reindex. It did not work ( i didn't really expect it to either, because the problem was that it wasn't even attempting to search). Has anyone had this happen to them, or know how to fix it?

Thanks in advance for any information you can give me,
Dan

Nevermind. The third restart fixed it. Still odd though...