After disabling Spotlight in MacOSX, the Spotlight icon in the menu bar was still there, taking up precious space on my 12" PowerBook G4. Here's how to disable the icon as well:

  sudo chmod 0 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/
  pkill -9 SystemUIServer

And, while we're at it - again the procedure to disable the Dashboard:

  defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

Enable with "NO" again and start "Dashboard" from /Applications.