You all know that I installed Leopard the day after it was launched. And I chose the default installation, which more or less shoe-horns the OS over the existing Tiger installation. Well yesterday, after attempting to open a large file, the dock suddenly disappeared and very shortly after that the entire system froze and I was forced to do a hard reboot. When I did a login to my non-administrator account the dock was not there at all and just occasionally reappeared for about 2 seconds before disappearing again. The dock worked fine in my administrator account so I assumed that it was something in my home folder.

Another weird thing I noticed: on emptying my Trash I had over 28,000 files in there. I hadn't been doing any serious file manipulations, what the heck was happening? Took about a minute to delete all the files in the Trash. Repaired permissions - took very long- and got the message "ACL found but not expected on APPLICATIONS" and "ACL found but not expected on Library". Whatever..

I was coming to the conclusion that it was perhaps not such a good idea to do the default installation of Leopard. In previous updates of Mac OS I always preferred a clean installation, i.e. essentially starting from scratch and manually reinstalling all your apps and preferences - loads of work I wanted to avoid.

Today I solved the problem, at least my dock is now there again and not doing the disappearing act. When the dock appeared very briefly I noticed a JPEG File (not as an icon) that was on the top of the Downloads stack. It was 3.8 MB in size. When I deleted this file, suddenly the dock appeared again and stayed put this time. I have a hunch that the dock had some kind of problem creating the icon of the picture file and thus always disappeared again to rebuild. More of a stacks problem than dock problem I assume.

Let's see if the Leopard will surprise us again - I hope not