I've had Dock and Dashboard crashes everytime I tried to download something with my dial up conexion... but this was solve by going to Terminal and typing killall Dock
This is something that I've learned here... Mad Jew told me to do it and it worked fine, now my dock and dashboard are working great.😀
BTW be sure not to have to many widgets open at the same time if you're not going to use them... this may cause the crash as well😛
FYI once you killall Dock, you need to restart and your DOCK will be as it was when you bought your computer, that means that you'll have to customize it again as it was. 😱