Disappearing Dock??!!

[Santabean2000]

Very suddenly my dock has disappeared, (and occasionally reappears), and is now completely non-useable. Why..?

I have created other accounts on my computer previously and the dock on those is fine...

I have looked in Activity monitor and it flashes on and then disappears in there.

I tried using terminal to 'killall Dock', but this did nothing...

Am using Leopard on Alu iMac.

Any ideas what's going on? - Please help!

 

[richard.mac]

try pressing command-option-D. dock options can be set in system preferences or by right clicking on the separator between the apps and the trash.

 

[Mac-Addict]

Its been happening to me too! Its easy to fix and comes back in a few seconds its just annoying

 

[Santabean2000]

Nooo...
My Dock is crashing, not just disappearing. It flicking between on/off.
Is there some sort of reset function..?

 

[dmw007]

I trust you do not have the dock set to automatically hide/show in 'Dock Preferences'?

 

[Eidorian]

Make sure you don't have hiding turned on first.

Otherwise moving ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist will effectively reset the Dock.

 

[Santabean2000]

Yep, I'm not smart, but I have checked all those sorts of things.
What I'm talking about is a Dock that is acting very erratically and doing things that it definitely should not be doing, (and nothing that it should be!).

Perhaps i'll send an email to Apple...

 

[dmw007]

Yep, I'm not smart, but I have checked all those sorts of things.

Sorry, I did not mean to question your intelligence. I was just trying to think of anything that might have been overlooked- sometimes we forget to try the obvious/easy solutions first.

What I'm talking about is a Dock that is acting very erratically and doing things that it definitely should not be doing, (and nothing that it should be!).

Perhaps i'll send an email to Apple...

That or a call to Apple support sounds like a good idea.

 

[Santabean2000]

Success!!

Just in case there are others out there with a similar prob...

After a bit of a search I found the solution - a corrupted file in the downloads directory. Deleted = Sorted.

 

[guygraham]

re: success

A client of mine also had the same problem, but instead of a corrupt download, she had something in the "documents" stack that the Dock didn't like. I had her move all her documents out of her Documents folder and the Dock appeared again. She was able to move all her documents back with no problem.

 

[andresrw]

A client of mine also had the same problem, but instead of a corrupt download, she had something in the "documents" stack that the Dock didn't like. I had her move all her documents out of her Documents folder and the Dock appeared again. She was able to move all her documents back with no problem.

PERFECT AND EASY SOLUTION!!! how weird....my dock was't working at all and the command + tab keyboard shortcut neither!
just take out the documents and downloads from the original stack folder. and bum! problem solve!!!

THANK YOU!!!

 

[j-a-x]

My dock sometimes dissappears too in Leopard.
I just force quit it in the terminal (which is annoying to get to with no dock) - by typing killall Dock. that restarts the dock and after that everything works fine.

 

[mrmagic9799]

A client of mine also had the same problem, but instead of a corrupt download, she had something in the "documents" stack that the Dock didn't like. I had her move all her documents out of her Documents folder and the Dock appeared again. She was able to move all her documents back with no problem.

Weird that was EXACTLY my problem...There was a file in my documents folder and the dock just didn't like it!!...But it worked

 

[jwilcox09]

I've tried this and my dock was going in and out and now it had disappeared completely and only comes back when I restart, which takes forever and usually results in restart errors, but I tried moving the my documents out of documents and it didn't seem to do anything...maybe i'll just call apple (i did pay all that money for apple care).