Snow Leopard - Dock icons randomly disappear

Snow Leopard works great! My mac's really fast after this. But sometimes the dock icons just disappear! I see the blue dot beneath when I click the empty space. So I know the item's there. But there are no icons! This happened for Safari and Downloads.

Some people responded on the Apple forums that I should try and remove the dock's plist file. But this just restores the dock to its original settings! I don't want to lose my settings.

Anyone else facing this issue with SL? Or is it a problem only I am facing?

Thanks

lostInTransit

Posted 2009-10-31T04:37:41.177

Reputation: 349

Answers

That has happened to me with the Mail and Address Book icons, they became invisible but the blue dot would remain when the apps were in use. It seemed odd that it would happen with the two Apple apps.

My procedure for correcting the problem affects only the app with the problem.

quit the app
right click (I have a two-button mouse) on the invisible icon
chose 'Options - Show in Finder'
chose 'Options - Remove from Dock'
rebooted the app from the Finder window
chose 'Options - Keep in Dock' and moved the icon back to its original place.

That immediately corrected the problem. The icons remained after reboot.

Laur Hagan

Posted 2009-10-31T04:37:41.177

Reputation:

I was able to fix this same issue on Mavericks similarly: by toggling the Options -> Keep in Dock value. – eebbesen – 2014-08-23T19:00:09.270

Thanks. will give that a go. But doesn't look like a permanent solution. Might as well file a bug report with Apple. – lostInTransit – 2009-11-04T12:22:25.297

It was a permanent fix for me. Remove invisible icon from dock, restart app from Finder window, then 'Keep in Dock' option before quitting app. The previously invisible icon now remains visible in the dock. Haven't had a problem since. – None – 2009-11-05T13:46:28.337

If that procedure doesn't work for you, cause of your problem must be different than what I had experienced. Please let us know what does resolve your problem. – None – 2009-11-05T13:57:36.450

Deleted the dock's plist file and rebooted and I lost my dock settings. Copied the file again from trash to the Library and all icons now appear fine! Don't really know what happened :) – lostInTransit – 2009-12-03T07:16:06.547

Open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal and enter the following case-sensitive command:

killall Dock

Dock will restart.

Raj

Posted 2009-10-31T04:37:41.177

Reputation: 61

Alternatively, just log out and back it. – Daniel Beck – 2011-04-06T12:16:34.947

Nice, this fixed the problem for me. – Juan A. Navarro – 2011-06-15T11:01:16.270

I've had the same happen just now, and resolved by:

Open Activity Monitor, find and Quit the Dock Process. Dock will restart with icons. Not sure how permanent this 'fix' is.

Jude

Posted 2009-10-31T04:37:41.177

Reputation: 11

I had the same problem. Clobbering the plist is not a good solution if you've got a lot of customization in place. For me the fix came when I selected "Show in Finder" when I clicked and held on the invisible icon. The invisible icon magically reappeared and has seemed to stay back through a dock restart.

Kit Doan

Posted 2009-10-31T04:37:41.177

Reputation: 11

I just had a similar problem; but, instead of disappearing, the icons were corrupted, like what happens to the display when a graphics board fails (a few were disappeared). killall Dock did not work, but, removing the icon cache (in /var/folders/(2 letters)/(more letters)/-Caches-/com.apple.dock.iconcache) and then killall Dock brought everything back. You can get the path if you echo $TMPDIR and replace -Tmp- at the end with -Caches-

(This is probably only valid for snow leopard, and the path and filename has changed in 10.7 or 10.8)

Kent

Posted 2009-10-31T04:37:41.177

Reputation: 1 354