Children at my Mac – non-removable dock icons

The main reason I created a separate user account for my four-year old son was to allow him making a mess without annoying anybody. Which turned out to be a very wise decision. Even when he was a small baby he had the special gift of activating some obscure Mac OS X function I never knew existed – and of course I always had a hard time finding out how to deactivate it afterwards.
So there he goes with his own account, happily dragging files around in Finder and making a mess of his very own desktop. Now, a while ago he proudly showed me what he did to his dock. I have to admit it was an amazing sight. He had dragged about two dozen files, most of them Objective-C header files, to the dock, squishing up all the programs in the far left corner. Well done, or so I said, until a week later I tried to clean up for him.
I don't know what sort of sticky glue he must have used, but now I cannot pull those header files off again, I can't even rearrange them. Same for the program icons. When I bring up the context menu, it doesn't show the 'remove from dock' option. It looks like the dock is locked or something.
So again, my son's discovered some feature I didn't even know existed. Can anybody tell me how to unlock the dock again?
cheers
Hendrik
P.S. I'd love to share the screenshot, but I don't think Apple discussions permit uploads, or do they?

OK, so here's what it looks like:
The icon's do not even pull off. I can activate the context menu by holding the touchpad button, but if I try to drag an icon off, the icon simply unhighlights and nothing happens.
@Niel: I tried the defaults write, but didn't help. I find the idea of my son hacking a 'defaults write' command into the Terminal to lock his creative artwork absolutely thrilling, but it's about as improbable as the infinite improbability drive.

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Perhaps the question was too vague and that's why there has been no response. Or maybe nobody knows. Let me try to elaborate.
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What were you doing when you noticed that your icons became invisible?
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antdude wrote:
John Galt wrote:
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Regards
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Children at my Mac – non-removable dock icons

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