My Dock resets at every restart

Okay, I seem to have fixed it! It has required a lot of redundancy, as I had to repeat the same tasks over and over until I found what ever magic order of operations was required for it to work! Basically I deleted the com.apple.Dock.plist, which was the only real advice anyone ever suggested, and then once it was rebuilt, I opened the "Get Info" on the new plist file, unlocked it, and ensured it was read/write enabled for permissions. Changed the Dock, restarted, and since then my Dock changes stay after restart.

Now I had checked permissions with Utilities initially, and repaired them, I had checked the "get info" file info as well, but that plist was corrupted somehow to begin with, so it wasn't repairing correctly I'm guessing. That was when I deleted it and restarted, but it would always reset to default.

Now I used utilities to repaired permissions, and also used TechTool from Micromat, which are time consuming, and they would say that everything checked out, everything was repaired, but it still would revert to default every time.

As others have noted, after deleting and restarting, Spotlight would not reliably show that the dock.plist was rebuilt; so it looked like there was no replacement file to even delete half the time. I think maybe this was an indexing lag that added to the confusion...but I honestly don't know 100%. I had to manually go through folders item by item until I found it again.

So to summarize my rambling; what I think is the answer to my Dock issues for others looking for a fix:

No short cuts! Open your start up hard-drive, open the Library folder, open the preferences folder, and find the com.apple.Dock.plist - it may be in a different Library folder then the main Folder in your system. It might be in a library under Users or in the System file.

After deleting mine the first time I could only find it in the pathway on the start up drive System folder/ Library/LaunchAgents file. So yours may be in different locations in different Library files.

Once you find it, Get Info and ensure you have Read& Write permissions for the file. Make the required modifications to your Dock, and restart.

If it doesn't work, delete it, restart, and repeat the process. For me, this seems to have worked, as the rebuilt file did not have the required Read & Write permissions that would allow the changes to be saved to the preference changes in the plist, and the file was not in the location of the original deleted file. It was a long and convoluted path to discovery, and there was no real instructions on how to do this. I hope my system stays working stably, and that others can piece this information together to fix their related issues.

I welcome any additional insight or comments! (or explanations that make better sense of it...)

😐

Hello,

Anyone who reads this and has had the same problem, please add a reply. Even if it spontaneously fixed it's self, or you gave up trying to fix it, give a shout out. I'm just trying get a fix on how common the problems is.

Thanks all,

Brian.

hello Chemical Stu (nice Handel by the way!)

Thanks for your post; between the two of us now, I think we have hit on the key issue that will help others; it's in the "permissions" to the preference files, which is tied to the "user".

When I think back, it all started when I uninstalled software as well. In my case it was Magellan GPS software.

What I think happens is the system doesn't let the user profile access the dock preference file with read/write privileges, so it just goes to default at every restart.

Your solution fixes the problem perfectly, and probably more quickly then I could. Thanks for the info.

Post if you have any other issues.