Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Today my friend’s brother, Scott, had a problem with his Dock where it would start up, show for a second or less, disappear for a while, return again randomly, and disappear again. A look at Activity Monitor revealed that the Dock process was repeatedly crashing and restarting.

He called Apple tech support and talked to a level 3 tech, who stated that it was a problem with his “profile” being corrupted (which I find to be a questionable explanation, as there is no single object commonly called a “profile” to be corrupted) and the solution to his problem was to create a new account, move his files over, and delete the old account. Scott wasn’t happy with this solution, so he called me to see if I had a better answer.

Via iChat screen sharing (I love that feature), I figured out that a JPG stored in his Downloads folder was corrupted.  When the Dock would start and attempt to load the icon previews for the Downloads stack, it would come upon this corrupted JPG and be unable to create the icon preview, so the Dock would crash. Launchd, I assume, considers the Dock a very important system component, so it would attempt to restart the Dock, which would crash again, and the loop continued. Deleting the offending JPG from the Downloads folder allowed the Dock to start normally.

So, when you have a repeatedly crashing and restarting Dock, the solution may be to check the files contained in folders you’ve made stacks out of and delete the ones that are corrupted or don’t open or preview correctly in the Finder.

Do the third level Apple tech support people take advantage of iChat’s screen sharing ability? Scott didn’t give me enough detail about his support call for me to know. And shouldn’t a high level tech know enough to recommend that a user try finding corrupted files in stacks before suggesting recreating an entire account? (If Scott had followed the tech’s advice, he would have created a new account and copied over the same corrupt file and had the same problem with the Dock.) Shouldn’t the Dock be a little more robust, so that a single bad file in a stack doesn’t crash the entire application, leaving less technically proficient users at a loss for an explanation or fix?