Spotlight mds crashing

Had a problem with Snow Leopard in which spotlight window would keep deleting whatever text i entered into it after a second - I traced this to a crash of the mds processes that run spotlight's indexing.
Console would say the following:

23/01/10 7:53:11 PM mds[471] (Normal) DiskStore: Rebuilding index for /
23/01/10 7:53:12 PM mds[471] (Normal) DiskStore: Creating index for /
23/01/10 7:53:13 PM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.metadata.mds[471]) Job appears to have crashed: Segmentation fault
23/01/10 7:53:13 PM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.metadata.mds) Throttling respawn: Will start in 9 seconds
23/01/10 7:53:13 PM com.apple.ReportCrash.Root[470] 2010-01-23 19:53:13.403 ReportCrash[470:2b03] Saved crash report for mds[471] version ??? (???) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/mds_2010-01-23-195313_localhost.crash
23/01/10 7:53:22 PM mds[474] (Normal) DiskStore: Rebuilding index for /
23/01/10 7:53:22 PM mds[474] (Normal) DiskStore: Creating index for /
23/01/10 7:53:23 PM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.metadata.mds[474]) Job appears to have crashed: Segmentation fault

And so on...
When I ejected by boot camp partition the problem went away! It seems spotlight was trying to index my bootcamp drive because for some reason it wasn't in spotlight's privacy list in the control panel. How silly!