Thanks for your reply - I already did what you suggested. I just noticed from my post I neglected to add dock.app before the is in "What ever happened is sucking".
Mike
Ran the disk repair process and now I am getting the message "Dock quit unexpectedly". I tried reloading Dock.app from the install CD but no luck - still get the same message. Next I reinstalled Mac OS X - using the version 10.6 SL CD. Still getting the same message.
Really didn't get a...