I HAVE NO DOCK!!!

do you have a background or can you change your background, Does expose work or dashboard. I'm having the same problem if those thing done work either!

Dock has been lost on my machine, too, after installing 10.5. I have changed my background, turned off hiding of the dock and still no dock. Help....

I too am missing the dock on my MacBook Pro. Installation on my iMac went fine but one the MacBook Pro, no dock. Tried a few things like adjusting system preference but no go. I am trying to reinstall to see if that fixes.

I reinstalled the OS and still no dock. Is there a workaround anyone found?

I reinstalled and still no dock. Apple -- please help.

Hello,

The same thing happened to me this morning, and I found a solution. After re-installing to no avail, I finally realised that the dock was actually starting and continually crashing. I also noticed that I had downloaded a .jpg file that for some peculiar reason refuses to 'play nice' with quick view. In fact that file has crashed my finder every time I have tried to quick view it. Anyway, when I realised that I had a copy of that file in my downloads stack, I realised that it was crashing the dock, because it could not render an icon of that file to show as the stack icon. The problem was solved when I deleted the file from the 'downloads' folder in the finder (its in the user home i think), and the default stack icon returned, with my dock.

I am not sure that this will help, but at least you could give it a go. Try find any files in a stack that are not working well with with quick view, and see if removing them from a stack brings your dock back.

Take care,
-Sami

No problem on my account. But had same problem on the second account on my machine.
Selected in the "apple" menu a few times "dock->position on x" and "dock->turn hiding on/off" and at some point it appeared and stayed for good.

Deleting my download files solved the problem. Thanks

Very good suggestion. However, my downloads folder is empty. My thinking is that there are some docked items not compatible with the new OS. Unfortunately, I think I need to get rid of those icons or items from the dock to fix, but I can't take those off without using the dock. I am stuck. Does anyone know where the information about those icons in the dock is stored at? I just need to go back to default and I think it will work. Thanks.

there was also nothing in my download folder so I moved around some stuff in documents folder with is now also on the dock and once i did that everything worked fine. There has to be something in you documents folder that keeps crashing the dock.

Emptied out both my Applications folder and Files folder and moved somewhere else and still having issues. This is very frustrating.

hello fellow Dock-less mac users. i too was having this problem. i had one of those "problem" files that quickview simply did not want to look at. i removed it from my downloads folder and the problem was solved. here is a link to a file the will actually cause this problem:

http://www.mavisxp.com/public/Finder_Crasher.zip

i found it on this macrumors.com forum, post #14:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=375029

i was going crazy over this until i found this thread. check all your files in your different stacks and try them out in quickview. if you get one that's crashing quickview, move it somewhere else and try again. good luck!

Sad end to my quest to fix this issue. I heard people removing things from downloads, documents or application folders to fix this problem. I did a dumb thing. I transferred all three of those folders to another folder. When I moved the application folder, it asked me for a password. I provided it and it moved. When I tried to move it back to applications folder, it asked me the password but now my account which was a administration account was now normal account.

Big warning because I couldn't get back the administration status. I called Apple support and the only thing I can do is reformat the drive and start again. I did manage to backup most of the stuff so I hope I hope I didn't lose anything. I am formatting it now. My fingers are crossed.

You definitely did -not- need to erase the drive just to get admin rights on an account. What steps did you try when trying to resolve the problem?

At the very worst, the most you should have needed to do would be to do an "archive & install" installation with the "keep users & preferences" option unchecked, but even that should have been a last resort.

sigh

Well, I was told by the Apple support person that it was the only way. The problem was that I was in a vicious circle. Once I had the System Preference outside the Application folder, it somehow converted my only account from Administrator to Normal account. When I tried to put the System Preference back in to the Application folder, it asked me for admin password. Since I didn't have an admin account anymore, I couldn't get it restored. I think in the long run, reformat was the easy way. Thank god the backup data worked. I am fully restored, just need to add a few applications and I should be GTG. Thanks for your answer.