Fedora Users — Beagle not Indexing Files -- also locks up system

I've just started beagle.  It's been hard at work for about a day with
CPU usage generally at about 100%.  It has indexed some of my mail and
probably some of my mailing list, but not much else.  I'm accessing
beagle via the KDE kerry applet, which seems to run OK; user_xattr is
enable in the filesystems being indexed.  

This is my second run; in the first run I didn't have user_xattr
enabled: I ran beagled for a while, stopped it deleted ~/.beagle, and
restarted.  It's possible that this may have confused file attributes.

BTW: While I was composing this message, beagled and evolution got into
a very strange state, using vast amounts of CPU time and swap space.
The swap space was (if I remember right) about 2.9 GB, which was enough
to give the system an unusably slow response.  I killed beagled --
unsuccessfully using beagle-shutdown and then successfully using pkill
-- which restored the system to usability, and then killed evolution --
also via pkill, sinde it was totally unresponsive -- which caused the
swap space to be freed.

Here's a log of my fight with beagle and evolution:
        844 ~ $ beagle-shutdown
        845 ~ $ pgrep beagle
        2730
        2855
        846 ~ $ beagle-shutdown --help
        ERROR: The Beagle daemon does not appear to be running  <== Plainly WRONG
        847 ~ $ pkill beagle
        848 ~ $ pkill -9 beagle
        849 ~ $ pgrep beagle
        850 ~ $ pkill evolution


Does anyone know:
        Why beagled isn't indexing my files?
        Why beagled is taking so long to do anything?
        What just happened to my system?

Here is the output, taken before the swap fit, of:
        $ beagle-info --index-info
        Index information:
        Name: EvolutionDataServer
        Count: 200
        Indexing: False
        
        Name: EvolutionMail
        Count: 3928
        Indexing: False
        
        Name: KMail
        Count: 0
        Indexing: True
        
        Name: Files
        Count: 0
        Indexing: False
        
        Name: GaimLog
        Count: 0
        Indexing: False
        
        Name: IndexingService
        Count: 0
        Indexing: False
        
        Name: Tomboy
        Count: 0
        Indexing: False
        
        Name: Blam
        Count: 0
        Indexing: False
        
        Name: Liferea
        Count: 0
        Indexing: False
        
        Name: Akregator
        Count: 0
        Indexing: False
        
        Name: KonquerorHistory
        Count: 0
        Indexing: False
        
        Name: Kopete
        Count: 0
        Indexing: False
        
        Name: applications
        Count: 450
        Indexing: False
        
        Name: documentation
        Count: 15494
        Indexing: False