Open applictions not showing in dock

Question

hello
repeatedly, some of the running applications show neither in the Dock, nor in the—how do you call this? Applications Switcher? The thing we get when we push cmd-tab to fast switch from one running application to another. Never had this in 10.4. Anyone seen that problem? Any solution?
thanks

Answer 1

This could be a plist corruption problem, but I'm not sure.
Sometimes, the preference list files get corrupted. You can usually just remove them and they'll get re-created. This may require you to reset certain settings. A notable exception to this is the Mail plist which actually stores the Library structure of your email accounts. Deleting the Mail plist will definitely cause lots of problems, but is recoverable.
The plist files are stored in the /Users/username/Library/Preferences/ folder. They usually have the naming convention of com.company.programname.plist.
A simple troubleshooting technique is to move a suspect plist file out of the Preferences folder and start up the app, again. It will re-create the plist from scratch.
In your case, I would try the com.apple.dock.plist. You can use Activity Monitor to kill the Dock app and it will restart. Or, you can log out and log back in.
There is a new file with Leopard called com.apple.dock.db. I haven't figured out what it does, but you might try moving it out. If anything gets worse, you can move the old file back in replacing the newly created one.
This all sound somewhat odd, so I don't know if this will help.