Panther bugs

Dock popping in an out

[rjohara]

I just decided to upgrade from 10.2 (Jaguar) to 10.3 (Panther). I'll try hard to retrain my customary rant about what a usability disaster OSX is overall. I figured 10.3 at least couldn't be any worse than 10.2.

So 10.3 is now installed. And the dock just keeps popping in, then disappearing, then popping in, then disappearing. This is *not* the "hide automatically" feature when you mouse over the area. I can just lean back in my chair and watch it appear and disappear along the right side. The dock doesn't repond to any of the system preference changes: I can't move it, make it permanently appear or disappear: it just slides in and out without end along the right side, like an old broken VCR blinking on and off.

Any ideas?

[DerekH]

if you can get 10.3 to "go" you'll find it very stable with some definite improvements over 10.2 - coloured labels are back for example.

What has gone wrong?
Sometimes it seems that if the current OS is slightly flaky, the upgrade will be moreso. Good advice (in arrears!) is to check the permissions and the disk before upgrading.

Right now, I'd read the support at www.apple.com, but the best way forward might be to check and repair permissions and the disk, and then do an "archive and install" - I've done that before - it keeps your old OS and "starts again"

Not a lot of help I know, but something's wrong and when you can fix it I think you'll be 20% happier than you were with 10.2
DerekH

[too much information]

It sounds like you have something wrong with your machine. I have had no problems with any version of OSX, maybe you need to back up your data, format and do a clean install.

[BwanaZulia]

I had this happen on a family members iMac.

Basically, your Dock application is starting up, dieing, starting up, etc.

The problem I found was that she had picked some iPhoto Album to be here desktop backgroun (in Control Panels -> Desktop(?)) and that was the cause. As soon as I changed the desktop background to another picture, it worked fine.

If this is not the case for you, what I would to start is to a repair permissions on your entire hard drive. If it is a damaged permission, this should fix it.

After that, I would go one by one, through your applications and see which is the one that might be killing off the dock.

If that is not it, I would find (search) the dock prefs and see if you could erase them (copy first of course) because maybe they are bad.

There are other things like using the process monitor to watch the applications and the unix command top, but I am hoping of the of other suggestions helps.

Good luck.

BZ