Possible Simultaneous Corruption in Dock, Exposé and Spaces?

I upgraded to 10.5 a couple of weeks ago, and it was running smoothly, save for some Time Machine issues, until yesterday morning. I woke my computer up and exposé would no longer work--none of my F quick keys were functional, I couldn't Tab+~ to cycle through applications, nothing. Spaces also shut down (or more correctly, the menu bar icon said that I had not yet enabled Spaces even though I had been using it the entire time I've had Leopard), but the Dock was acting even stranger.
I normally keep my Dock at the bottom of the screen and hidden, but since yesterday I can neither hide nor show it at will. I can't change the side it's on, and now it randomly shows itself (it's come up at least 3 times since I've been writing this), but either disappears when I try to click on it, or seems frozen for a second and then vanishes. I've been able to launch one application--Safari--one time from the Dock in two days. I can't make changes to the Dock, or Spaces or Exposé, for that matter, through System Preferences.
I've deleted the Dock preferences several times, run disk utilities several times, started in Safe mode, turned off all my peripherals, reinstalled my Waccom driver (out of pure desperation) and done a clean reinstall of Leopard, but so far nothing has worked. Disk utilities says everything is fine, and though I've run into the same problems repairing my permissions that others here have found--the LONG run time, the barber pole without progress, the weird messages--it seemed to have worked okay.
I can manually launch programs from the Applications folder, and they seem to be working pretty well when they are launched. The only thing that I've noticed that could be out of the ordinary, though I don't know, is that when I delete the Dock preferences--both com.apple.dock.db, and com.apple.dock.plist--another file, com.apple.dock.db-journal, will flash every so often, though not necessarily when the dock reappears.
(right this second half the dock peeked up, disappeared and then after a beat, appeared fully and disappeared again--in roughly the same amount of time it took me to write this sentence).
As you can probably guess, by now I'm desperate and completely out of ideas. Does anyone have any insight?
Thanks.

Can't find the edit button, so I'll add two things onto the list:
7. Terminal - sudo periodic daily weekly monthly
8. Reinstalling OS X
...and nothing has worked.
And for some reason, there is some screen tearing while scrolling... could this be a problem with core video/animation?

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