A Dock trick NOT to try(?)

Question

In some list of tips for Leopard I read about one that seemed useful: navigate to /Volumes/ with the 'Go to folder' Finder item, then drag the tiny icon representing it at the top of the Finder window into the stacks area of the Dock. Cool! A new way to open any mounted volume or see which are mounted. I tried it & sure enough, a stack appeared in the Dock, filled with the volumes mounted on my iMac.
Except... Things started to go wonky pretty quickly. First of all, I noticed that every volume appeared in the stack with a Time Machine volume icon. Hmmm. Odd, but no big deal, I thought. But then window focus started acting funny: clicking in another window to bring it to the front activated it but did not bring it to the front until I clicked in it a second time. A third click was required to make a text field in that window active.
Then, about the same time a Time Machine backup was scheduled, Safari (which was the frontmost active app at the time) froze. It didn't quit, it just went into 'spinning beach ball forever' mode. I clicked on the desktop & made Finder active with no problem, but I decided to click & hold on Safari's Dock icon (to see what menu item appeared) & the Dock froze: the Safari icon stuck in its Dock-magnified size; its icon in its darkened, "selected" state; with only the application name & not the menu popped out. Running the pointer across the Dock did not magnify anything else nor would it respond to other clicks.
Shortly thereafter, the Finder froze & the Mac became totally non-responsive: no crashes, spinning beach balls, or kernel panics, just a frozen screen in which not even the mouse pointer would move. My only alternative was to force a shutdown with the power switch.
To my horror, on restart progress never would go beyond the first grey screen -- no spinner, no Apple logo, no nothing. I had been there before: when first installing Leopard via the upgrade method, I had just about the same sequence of events, starting with the frozen Dock & ending with the frozen grey reboot screen. The eventual remedy was the same: reset PRAM on restart, which finally let me boot from the Leopard DVD -- not even that would work without a PRAM reset. Running Disk Utility from the DVD, I performed a disk repair (nothing amiss found), reselected my normal Leopard startup disk, & it restarted normally.
I hastily removed the Volumes stack from the Dock, & since then have had no problems.
So what I would like to know is if anyone else has tried putting /Volumes/ in the Dock & what happened when you did. I would also like to know if when you navigate to /Volumes/ in the Finder (using the "Go to Folder" item from the "Go" menu, since it is otherwise invisible), what icons you see for each volume alias the folder contains. What I see is a Time Machine volume icon for every volume except my startup one. I don't know if this is normal if Time Machine is in use or a symptom of a lingering problem I need to fix.
Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

I've used that trick, specifically to get easy access to my Time Machine Drive so I can shut it off when I put my computer to sleep (don't like that noisy whirring fan). Has worked fine for me except for one occasion when I mounted a downloaded DMG. It didn't seem to mount correctly and corrupted the grid for the Volumes stack. I also couldn't get the offending disk image to eject. Probably not related to your problem though.
When I look at the volumes window in Finder as you request I see a Time Machine icon and a standard Macintosh HD icon (both aliases in fact). Hope this helps.