Trying to get this one simple Automator workflow running has been quite a nightmare. Completely aside from Spotlight's retarded and inconsistent behaviour with regards to finding files (the thing it's supposed to be able to do but clearly cannot), there now appears to be an issue with Automator that it produces completely different results depending on whether you run your workflow from within Automator.app itself or as a Finder plugin.
To illustrate, I ran exactly the same workflow twice, once from within Automator, once from within Finder. The workflow is simple: it is meant to pick up files that match a certain keyword, create a zip archive of them and put the renamed archive into a particular folder.
Here is Spotlight picking up the results fine from within Automator.
Here are the files created from the two tests of the workflow. The file names show indicate which ones were produced by the plugin and which were produced within Automator itself.
Look at the contents of the zip files. When I run the workflow from within Automator.app, it works fine. When I run it from the Finder, it goes completely bezerk and does Christ knows what.
WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE?
If anyone has ANY ideas, please let me know, because these bugs are driving me up the wall. This is absolutely the last time I buy a release of OS X prior to at least the X.n.5 point release.