Dock and System Preferences Reset after Crash

Hi,
My computer restarted itself when I was opening a keynote document (there was no warning and I can't find a crash log). When it came back my dock had reset to the default settings and several of the applications I had on my dock were no longer there. In addition some of the other preferences I had (such as Expose hot corners) were reset.
I can easily enough reset these, but this is the 3rd or 4th crash in as many weeks, so I'm nervous that there's something serious going on. Though the others have not had such visible after-effects.
What might explain losing my dock and system preferences? Is there an easy way to get them back?
Also, what's the best strategy for evaluating the health of my system and health of my hard drive so I can figure out what's going on? Yesterday I ran "periodic daily monthly weekly" as well as Repair Permissions from the disk utility. (no permissions problems were found)
MacBook Black   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   Only one user account on machine

I had a similar problem. I used Keynote for a talk, which I finished without any problems. But the screen was blank when I later opened my laptop back up. After a forced restart, the dock preferences were in some sort of default settings. I have an older Titanium PowerBook, so it doesn't look like this issue is specific to the Mac Books
I have run out of ideas after doing a number of things to try to track down all the issues. Here are some more specifics of the problem:
When I log out, and log back in, the dock settings always revert to a default setting (no need to restart the computer).
The dock settings for other users on the same computer work just fine.
When I remove the dock settings from the ~/Library/Preferences folder and log out/in, the problem still persists.
If I save a copy of a working dock settings file, I can log out/in, drop the working file into the Preferences folder, then use Activity Monitor to quit the Dock, and when it restarts it will use the correct settings.
I have removed the whole Preferences folder, then logged out/in, but the problem continues to exist.

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