I had a strange problem with my Mac (OSX 10.4.4) this morning–the Dock wouldn’t “unhide”. Normally I keep the Dock hidden to save screen real estate, and when I need to fire up one of my usual applications I just drag the mouse down to the bottom edge of the screen and voilà , the Dock pops up with all of my favorite apps. But this morning the Dock was being shy and wouldn’t reveal itself. I tried toggling all the preferences, but nothing helped. I finally found this suggestion on Apple’s Finder, Dock & Dashboard discussion site (registration required, or read my version of it here):
Delete (or move/rename) the com.apple.dock.plist in your ~Library/Preferences Folder, then log out and log back in. This worked for me, but I lost my Dock settings, in particular the applications that were in my dock! It seems obvious in hindsight, but I suggest that you make a list of your docked applications before you whack the preferences file, so you won’t have to repopulate your Dock from memory.
I have had the same problem, but only since upgrading to 10.5. I stumbled on a fix (I had been restarting when it got to be annoying enough to be worth it).
What has worked for me every time so far is to click on a blank area of the desktop and then type command-A. The dock instantly goes back to behaving the way I want it to.
this worked for me thanks!
but
I bet it will come back!
it might be related to systemUIserver
it might be a failing pram battery
iMac G5 running tiger 10.4.11 all uptodate, max RAM
interesting that the problem still exists in 10.5
Best wishes
Art