Dock crashing. very bad.

[Lt Major Burns]

for possibly the fifth time in the last 10 days or so, i've come back to my power mac to find the dock and all it's processes completely unresponsive (this includes, of course, Command+Tab, Exposé and Dashboard) and so the system is pretty screwed.

more worryingly is that a force quit from activity monitor actually quits it, sort of. it quits, and disappears, but never relaunches itself (but at the same time, the process is always present in Activity Monitor, even after a force quit). from this point on, all Dock related stuff is unusable, like the minimize button, for example, or even basic app switching. the only solution appears to be a hard restart, as even software restart stalls at the point where it needs to quit the dock.

help! this is bad.

 

[Giaguara]

Does force restarting Finder do anything different?
Did you do anything different before this started to happen, like install some software with an installer program etc?

 

[Yesurbius]

trash your dock prefs in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist

If its still doing it there, then run Activity Monitor (Utilities Folder) and see if one program has a higher CPU or Memory Usage. If everything looks fine - you may want to run Disk Utility->First Aid->Verify Disk to rule out any sort of filesystem / hardware issues.

 

[Lt Major Burns]

Finder restart = no change

Dock in activity Monitor: using 0.0 cpu cycles, and bugger-all memory. i force quit it, it says the process has been terminated, but then doesn't disappear (or possibly does, but reappears in exactly the same place).

the only way i;ve found to make it work without restart is quitting the WindowServer, but this obviously isn't the way to fix it.

there are no Dock crash logs created, so i can't post those up.

i'll try trashing the dock's plists, but i don't think it's that simple.

 

[Mikuro]

Do you use Classic often, or do you use any tools to "pause" apps, like AppStop or Cunning Fox? I've had similar problems myself that were related to those two things.

And then there's the standard troubleshooting advice: repair permissions, and maybe clear out various system caches with something like OnyX.

 

[Lt Major Burns]

Permissions repaired recently, no errors at all. i don't use any of the apps you mentioned, and i havent used classic in ages...

i'll try onyx, but i don't reckon a cache could do this

 

[dlloyd]

You ought to be able to tell if the dock has restarted by the Process ID. If it actually does relaunch, then this number will change.

 

[Lt Major Burns]

well, it's kinda evident that the dock hasn't restarted properly when it hasn't appeared at the bottom of my screen again

any more thoughts?

 

[bobw]

Try trashing the 'com.apple.windowserver.plist' file and restarting.

Do you have rotating background or use HP Director?

 

[Yesurbius]

I agree with bobw - trash /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist as the problem may not be dock. You can also try trashing ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow and /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow

To verify if Dock is restarting, check out its process id and see if it changes.

Terminal:

ps cx | grep Dock

You should get a line like:

696 ?? S 0:00.48 Dock

The first column with the number (696) is the processid. If the Dock process restarts, then you'll see a different process id. It should also be noted, that if WindowServer is dying, or you are killing it - that you may have multiple Docks. Kill them all off with 'killall Dock', then do the process list again to find the new single Dock process id. Take note of the process id.

Alternatively, you can go into Activity Monitor, type 'Dock' in the filter box and select ''My Processes" from the Show DropDown. From there you can check the process id's and Stop it.

When the Dock starts acting up again - check its process id - you can tell if it has restarted by the process id - it should be different. If not, then Dock did not restart. Restart it manually by killing the old process:

kill 696 (replace 696 with YOUR dock process id)
... or click on the STOP button in Activity Monitor.

If Dock restarts and appears to be working - then something caused Dock to act up. If nothing appears to change, but you confirm it did restart Dock (diff process id), then your problem will be elsewhere (ie. loginwindow, WindowServer). You can try killing loginwindow. Killing WindowServer will log you off of course