Spotlight Unexpectedly Quitting The Dock

Just now I did a Spotlight search and when I tried to select an item in the results it froze up and then quit! Since Spotlight runs from within the Dock application the entire menubar and dock shut down as well. Since the Dock application is such a fundamental element of the OS, it immediately restarted. Then, however (:( ), the element of the menubar that Butler runs was on the right side of the Spotlight menu, and made Butler totally unresponsive to the extent that I had to force it to quit to put the menu on the right (while left actually :) ) side of the Spotlight menu. My Spotlight index seems unharmed as I redid the search and was able to open the desired file. Have any of you ever had a simple Spotlight search unexpectedly quit the Dock?