Strange OS X (Leopard) dock problem

Factual Questions
1

This only happens maybe every month or so, and resolves flawlessly with a reboot, but it’s still bothering me. This is on a Intel-based MacBook, OS X 10.5.5

Every so often, in the course of my normal computering (probably running some combination of Firefox, NeoOffice, iTunes), my dock and dashboard will become completely unresponsive. Pressing F12 (to bring up the dashboard) or Command-tab to switch windows will just not do anything. Mousing over the bottom of the screen fails to bring up the dock. Going to Dock under the Apple menu will yield a perpetual pinwheel, but clicking randomly on the desktop and/or mashing escape gets me out of that. I can still open Finder windows by, say, clicking on my HD icon on the desktop, and my system doesn’t seem sluggish at all.

So basically, there are occasional periods where I lose my dock, dashboard, and command-tab window switching ability. Performance is otherwise normal. It’s obviously not a major issue, but it bugs me, and I haven’t been able to find reference to other people having this problem. Anyone want to take a guess as to what’s going on/how to prevent it?

2

I’m somewhat of a newbie at Mac, and I don’t know how to prevent your problem, but one potential solution, next time it happens, is to kill the dock.

Launch Terminal, and type “killall Dock” (be sure to capitalize “Dock”) and hit enter. This’ll kill the dock, and force it to reopen. Any other running programs will be unaffected. This’ll at least save you the trouble of rebooting.

3

I’ll add that the best way to get to Terminal (or any program not on your Dock for that matter) is to simply press Command+Space to bring up spotlight. I have never quite understood the need for quicksilver because this seems to work just as well. Just type in “ter” and hit enter and you’ll have your terminal

4

Another way to do this is to use Force Quit from the Apple menu and kill the Finder that way. That will restart your dock, as well as all the other Finder processes.

5

I’ve tried this, and it doesn’t fix the problem. Next time it happens I’ll see if doing it through Terminal works.

6

Here’s an Applescript that does the job:


set commandstring to "killall Dock
"

tell application "Terminal" to activate

tell application "System Events"
	keystroke commandstring
end tell

tell application "Terminal" to quit

say "beep"

-- you can comment out the beep with a couple of dashes if you want.
-- you can also set the variable commandstring to any other Terminal command you wish to use.