Dock crash

[Electric Monk]

So there I was watching a dvd (Alias Season 1 for those interested) uploading some ftp files in the background. Newsfire was on and doing nothing as was Mail. Omniweb was running a search.

What happens? The end of the world as we know it?
Not really.

When I resized the DVD window from full screen to a window I noticed my background was wrong. I had it set to transition every 15 minutes and it appears that one transition had gone wrong.

One picture filled the top left corner out to around halfway (and then cut off), the other picture was behind it full size.
At the same time I realized I couldn't use the Dock, I had set to hide and it didn't pop up like it was supposed to.

I opened up tinker tools via Quicksilver and it booted really slowly but it did open. I hit relaunch the dock. Nothing. I opened Activity Monitor and quit the dock. It rebooted but was still broken and oddly enough it was sucking 70-95% of my CPU both before and after the quit.

I logged out. It hung with just my broken wallpaper in front of me. I used both the restart and shut down dialogs with no effect and was forced to do a hard power off and then turn it back one.

So far… Everything is fine.

I'm running 10.3.8 on a 12" Rev. C Powerbook.

Anyone else experience anything like this?

 

[MacNut]

It sounds to me like you overloaded the processor.

 

[Electric Monk]

Well yeah, but processor use before the Dock took over everything was ~20%. The wallpaper switches and the Dock is suddenly sucking up 90% of the processor for itself.


Actually it could be because the dock is treated as a special program that you can't kill permanently. I figure some kind of conflict and whamo. Not being able to permanently kill the dock let it suck up all system CPU resources. If the conflict was ongoing then rebooting the dock would do nothing...

 

[continuum]

I am quite familiar with this as it happened to me routinely. Same type of thing going on with wallpaper set to change every few minutes, apps running, etc then wham! the dock would not come out of hiding and things would slooooow down. I zapped PRAM as was suggested by somebody here at macrumors and repaired permissions. Hasn't happened since.