Mission Control Crashing? This solution worked for me

Question

The first OS I used from Apple was Panther. Since then, I have had 3 machines and I never did a fresh install. I simply upgraded from one release to the next.
I never had any issue, but with Lion, things were different.
Lion installation process is full of rough edges and I lost many tweaks I have done on my OSX all these years, several icons were missing on Finder, several apps missing from the Dock and Mission Control was not working after the installation.
I banged my head on the wall for 24h until I found the culprit and Apple should test this better.
Here is the solution that worked for me.
The first test you should do is this:
1) create another user on your system
2) login to that user and see if Mission Control works there
3) if it works, congratulations and welcome to my private club: the Mission Control Crashers Club.
If MC works on the other user, the problem is with your account. So, continue reading this...
Do you have experience dealing with terminal and unix?
If you open a terminal window and type
cd ~  (enter)
ls -al .*   (enter)
you will see a list of all invisible files and directories that are stored on your home directory.
look at the names and dates you see there. In my case I have located files and directories created in 2008 (on another mac I don't even have anymore) and I also saw files and directores belonging to apps I have removed a long time ago.
look at each file or directory that starts with a point (= invisible).
if you locate a file you want to remove, type
rm .aaa
where aaa is the file name
if it is a directory, type
rm -r .bbb
where bbb is the directory name
when you feel you have removed all the old crap, log out and login again.
Try Mission Control and Dashboard then.
OBVIOUSLY, MAKE A BACKUP BEFORE REMOVING ANYTHING. DO IT AT YOUR OWN RISK.
In my case, the problem was solved.

Answer 1

Thanks for taking the time to come back and let us know - it is valuable to see when a fix has worked for someone.