High CPU usage after Office 2008 upgrade

After installing tonight the update for Office Mac 2008, my CPU started going crazy. The fans went off on my powerbook, which they never do except if I’m compiling wxwindows. Investigation showed that, as always when the CPU goes mad with no good reason, the mds and mdworker processes (which are part of spotlight) were hard at work. I was afraid I was getting bit by a runaway syslogd process (a bug I already had encountered on another machine), to which there is no clear fix at this time. 

In this thread I found the great ls_usage command, which showed that spotlight was really, really busy indexing all kind of stuff inside the various packages that compose Office 2008. Other reports confirm this. Since the process had already taken more than 45 minutes, and that there was no clear indication that it would ever end soon, I removed the following files from the spotlight indexing in system prefs : 

/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008  /Library/Automator   /Library/Application Support/Microsoft

Of course, these locations are never gonna be indexed by Spotlight in the future, but since there’s almost no chance that I’ll ever have to search for stuff there, it should be fine, right? Right?I guess that if I had a faster machine I would just have waited a little longer for Spotlight to do its thing… So the shorter advice if this happens again could be “wait longer”.