Why can't we stop SearchIndexer.exe?

You've only been brainwashed by M$ into thinking you're a slave (to
their software, not the machine itself).

If you really want to be in control of your computer, remove Windows
altogether and install Linux.

I use the Debian GNU/Linux distribution which is freely available to
download and is probably the most capable, or for about the price of a
music album CD you can get the entire distribution on a 5 DVD set. I'll
never run out of things to learn about and tinker with, and I'll never
need to go back to Windows. Use OpenOffice.org (also free) instead of M$
Office, and there are free equivalents of just about anything else that
runs on Windows, or there is a program called Wine that enables you to
run many Windows programs under Linux. You can also run VirtualBox (also
free) that allows you to install Windows in a virtual machine
environment (if you are fortunate enough to have Windows on CD, which is
rare with a new computer, probably to prevent this).

Unfortunately my wife uses a scrapbooking program that doesn't run
under Linux/Wine (yet) so she has to stick it out with Vista, and her
notebook is regularly unresponsive so with minimal Googling I arrived
here. She quite often uses one of my Linux machines when something in
Vista doesn't work (she wishes that her scrapbooking program would work
in Linux because she's really had enough of Vista). Unfortunately she
only has a Windows recovery disc so I may be unable to install it under
a virtual machine, but now that I think of it I'll try with my other
notebook that originally shipped with an XP recovery disc.

There's also plenty of Microsoft diehards out there who will try to
convince you that there's no problem or that you're just a stupid
enduser. I pity them because they're the ones that have been brainwashed
even more than you've been.

At the end of the day I first disabled Windows Search and then
uninstalled Windows Search 4.0, as my wife doesn't do a whole lot of
searching anyway (she is usually quite capable of organising and finding
her files without needing to search for them, and in the odd
circumstance when search is needed, it is expected to take some time
such that indexing isn't necesary).