Menubar/spotlight not working after reinstall.

[jeer]

I recently reinstalled OS X on my Mac Mini. Afterward, I noticed I didn't have the spotlight icon in my menu bar anymore. After searching the net, I found some places mentioning both Search.bundle and com.apple.systemuiserver.plist.

 

Search.bundle didn't exist on my system. At the time I couldn't find it anywhere, so I just reinstalled again. I still lacked Search.bundle after the second install. Eventually, I found it on a mac forum, and downloaded it. I placed it in my Coreservices folder and restarted the machine to no avail.

 

I decided to investigate my com.apple.systemuiserver.plist file. Inside the file, the clock, user quick-switch and volume control was listed--exactly what was in my menubar. To experiment, I deleted the line pertaining to the volume and saved. I used Activity Monitor to kill SystemUIServer. It flashed back a second later with no changes. The volume control was still there. Then, I deleted the com.apple.systemuiserver.plist file entirely, and restarted SystemUIServer. Again, no changes. Also, the com.apple.systemuiserver.plist file was not replaced.

 

It seems that:

 

1. /System/Library/Corservices/Search.bundle is not being installed when I do a complete system reinstall or during software updates (10.3.7 to 10.3.9).

 

2. /Users/username/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systemuiserver.plist doesn't control the menu bar at all--at least on my system--and is not being replaced after deletion and restart.

 

I've, of course, repaired permissions, ran software update and made new user accounts with no success. No, I've not installed anything besides what the software update did. I've been frustrated to no end with this.

[jeer]

Update

 

I was just told that spotlight is a part of 10.4. Before my reinstall I had spotlight running so I must have been running Tiger. My install disk is Panther. Why would my mini have Tiger installed but come with a Panther disk?