Spotlight won't appear, even after running through all listed fixes on top search pages (solved)

I spent a couple hours trying to solve this problem, and ultimately solved it myself by accident.

Problem: Spotlight will not appear. When I click the magnifying glass in the toolbar, or press command+space, nothing appears to happen. When clicking with the mouse, the magnifying glass activates, but no search box appears on screen.

Tried: All the articles I found walked me through rebuilding the index, doing various system repairs, and fixing the shortcut keys. I restarted my computer a gazillion times. None of these had any effect on the problem.

What actually worked: Disconnecting my external monitor! After having given up, and doing that, I pressed command-space by habit, and the search box appeared on the laptop screen. I imagine what was happening was that the coordinates of the search box were off-screen, thus it appeared to not be working. The condition persisted across restarts. After reconnecting the external monitor, the search box now appears on-screen. It's in a bit of a weird location (far away from the magnifying glass; 1/3 of the way down the screen), but fully rendered.

That was a waste of time... Glad I gave up on it and came back later. Maybe this'll prevent someone that pain.