Spotlight uses a LaunchAgent to try to continually relaunch itself when it terminates. While it's not really that big of a deal, you can also set the permissions of the launchagent to 0 to keep it from being readable... which will keep launchd from trying to restart spotlight every 10 seconds. After changing the permissions of the spotlight.app, if you look in the console log, you'll probably see a bunch of entries saying that it tried to relaunch and then failed.

To disable the spotlight launch agent:

sudo chmod 0 /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist

To put things back the way they were:

sudo chmod 644 /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist

Why there's no system preference for disabling the spotlight menu, I'll never understand. Way to go apple, thanks for telling me how to use my computer.

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I used Lingon for this...
Instead of chmoding the file I just disabled the agent (com.apple.Spotlight, under System Agents).
Seems more reasonable and less error prone.
Note: this also has the effect of removing the icon, so actually disabling the agent is all you need to do.

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