"Dock" and "Spaces" failure, OS X Unexpectedly Quits

Apologies if I've not posted in the correct forum, but it seemed the most relevant at the time.
I've been using my iMac for under a year and have encountered two reoccurring problems.
1) Dock becomes transparent, no formatting or colour fill. The dock does however, intensely reflect windows and icons. Despite the issue with graphics, all functionality remains.
This has been an issue since I first began using the iMac, after 'heavy' or demanding use (multiple applications, use of spaces, expose etc) so I thought it somewhat unimportant.
"kill all_dock" does not resolve the issue. Only a restart will rectify the Dock.
2) Using the side buttons on the mighty mouse to invoke spaces results in me being unable to 'select' anything with the mouse.
In fact, when I click on windows, it seems to 'deselect' the active window in question.
This occurs whenever I use the mighty mouse to get the spaces overview. There is no issues navigating spaces using 'alt' and 'arrow keys' - o by selecting on the programs assigned to a specific space.
Ultimately it is annoying as I have to restart for the mouse to function normally.
In addition it's become less uncommon for programmes to quite unexpectedly, including OS X itself
Techtool says all is fine. I'm not sure what else to do, but I do want my spaces back, and my Dock to function normally.
Any ideas?
Message was edited by: wesmo (technical details added)

I've ran DU:
27/10/2008 00:30:38 Disk Utility[191] Disk Utility started.
27/10/2008 00:31:34 Disk Utility[191] Verify permissions for “Macintosh HD”
27/10/2008 00:31:34 Disk Utility[191] Reading permissions database.
27/10/2008 00:31:34 Disk Utility[191] Reading the permissions database can take several minutes.
27/10/2008 00:37:20 Disk Utility[191] Permissions differ on "private/var/log/secure.log", should be -rw------- , they are -rw-r----- .
27/10/2008 00:38:22 Disk Utility[191] Group differs on "private/etc/cups", should be 0, group is 26.
27/10/2008 00:38:28 Disk Utility[191]
27/10/2008 00:38:28 Disk Utility[191] Permissions verification complete
27/10/2008 00:38:38 Disk Utility[191] Repairing permissions for “Macintosh HD”
27/10/2008 00:38:39 Disk Utility[191] Reading permissions database.
27/10/2008 00:38:39 Disk Utility[191] Reading the permissions database can take several minutes.
27/10/2008 00:44:28 Disk Utility[191] Permissions differ on "private/var/log/secure.log", should be -rw------- , they are -rw-r----- .
27/10/2008 00:45:30 Disk Utility[191] Group differs on "private/etc/cups", should be 0, group is 26.
27/10/2008 00:45:38 Disk Utility[191] Permissions repair complete
Don't know if the files are of significance, but when I ran it the second time DU reported no more issues.
DU was ran from my normal account (not the new administrator).
Techtool has 'passed' the iMac on all the tests it performed.

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