Mission Control Only Showing App Icons, NOT Windows

Try a guest account to see if this behavior persist globally.

Try a SafeBoot, test behavior would indicate if third party/ ext/ plug-in/ problem

Never seen this or heard of it, which is why I find it interesting.

If you need to investigate further, as leroydouglas suggested, here is how to boot in the Safe Mode.

Starting Up in the Safe Mode

What is Safe Mode

I'm having the same issue now. Sometimes works sometimes not. Since Lion update, this is the second time that it happens. The first time i don't remember what fixed. Weird. I don't have idea how to solve it.

Now it worked again. I just quit Safari and everything is working fine now. Re-open it and continue working. This issue may be an apllication problem, on this case it was Safari but can be others too.

TO SOLVE IT: Try to close Safari first, if continues close other applications. After this you can reopen it without any problem.

I noticed by the icon in your dock that you had Messages open at the time you encountered this issue. I'm having the EXACT same problem as well and I think it has to do with the Messages app. Right before posting this I had messages open and no windows in Mission Control, but immediately after quitting Messages Mission Control works perfectly again.

Can you try your Mission Control with other apps + Messages and then again after you've quit Messages. I'm wondering if the issue is as predictable on your machine as it is on mine.

I a just closed a few apps and the problem disappeared. I guess its due to mission control's overload (I think)

I have this problem too and would love a solution...when it happens to me it only seems to be on one of my spaces, if I use gestures to get to another space Mission Control" works fine on a different space, but if I go back to the original space it stops working..I have found a fix, which is just move the active window slightly, yep, that actually works, and then Mission Control starts working again...it's weird...would still love to know what causes it, even though the fix is an easy one...

Just on the safari comments above, I have noticed this happens when one of the tab has "reader" activated...turning of 'reader' seems to fix the issue with safari...

I had the same problem. As soon as I quit Messages the windows came back.

Restart the Dock

$ killall Dock

For me problem is caused by notes. With messages launched without notes it works.

I have this exact same problem, and I don't have any apps open apart from Word and Safari. Has anyone figured out how to fix it??

I was having this problem all the time. Messages was the app that caused this for me. But all of sudden after one of the OS updates, like 10.8.3 or .4, it hasn't done it since.

KOT