I have been having this weird recurring glitch on my laptop.
Periodically, with no recognizable pattern, the OS X Dock would become totally unresponsive.
Dashboard wouldn’t come up, Exposé wouldn’t work, the application switcher woudln’t work, and I couldn’t click an icon to launch or bring an application forward.
Also, it seemed like any operation that was accessing the file system would take a really long time.
The Dock was hung so bad, that it wouldn’t even shut down durning a normal log out or restart. The computer just hung there waiting for something.
The odd thing is that the dock wasn’t completely dead, just mostly dead. For example if an email came in during this freeze, the un-read email indactor on Mail.app’s icon would light up just fine.
Force quitting the Dock from the command line or Activity Monitor didn’t help either. The Dock process would just reappear in the process list, but wouldn’t actually relaunch. Force-quitting the loginwindow process (which forces you to log out) did clear up the problem temporarily.
It started out only if I was runing a lot of stuff at the same time. Like a heavy FTP transfer running in the background with Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Safari open at once. But as time went on, it just started happening whenever, and frequently.
When I upgraded to 10.4 a while back (which is prior to this bug showing up) I broke the cardinal rule, and I didn’t do an “Archive and Install” I just installed right on top of 10.3.
I think for most people this would be fine, but I had a bunch of wonky crap running in 10.3 that probably introduced some weirdness.
I’ve never found any reference to this particular problem any place. Perhaps my google-fu has become weak.
My solution today was to blow out my old system, doing an Archive and Install, then downloading all the system updates, and reinstalling mysql, php, etc.
Long tedious process, but it looks like it fixed the problem.
