Dock doesn't launch at login, other stuff.

Today I went through the process of customizing my dock icons without Candybar. I replaced the trash can icons manually, but it only showed the new icon if I put something in the trash and took it back out. When I logged in and out the icon had reverted to normal.

I went online to see what I could do about this, and some one said to delete the com.apple.dock.plist and com.apple.dock.db. I did so, but upon log in the dock would not open and the desktop had reverted to the default. I also couldn't activate exposé. I tried rebooting into safe mode but that did do anything either.

I went into system prefs and set the dock app in the core services as one of my log in apps, but when I log in it's set as the default desktop for a few seconds while the dock app launches. It works, but it's irritating.

What gives, and any advice?

 

My download folder is empty.

When I killed the dock, it simply didn't reboot. Expose also stopped working. Hitting option command d did nothing visible. I again had to launch the dock manually.

Thanks for posting, though.