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10.5: Fix Transparent Dock and invisible Stack problems System 10.5
If your Dock sometimes becomes transparent, and Stacks only show as label backgrounds -- often iTunes' Cover Flow mode stops working, too -- as illustrated here, you can use this Terminal command to recover:
sudo killall -HUP WindowServer
Warning:The above command will log you out and quit all open programs without warning -- so ideally, you should close any open programs before running the command. It does, however, prevent you from having to reboot, which is the only way I'd found to otherwise solve this problem. You can read more about this command in this hint; it's basically a way to restart the GUI without restarting the entire machine.

[robg adds: There are a few threads (1, 2, 3) about this problem on the Apple Discussions site; it appears to be somewhat common, but not really widespread. I haven't seen it myself across the collection of machines here in the Mac OS X Hints labs. Note that the above solution isn't really a permanent fix despite my titling of the hint. As I understand it, the problem may well recur after restarting the GUI.]
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10.5: Fix Transparent Dock and invisible Stack problems | 4 comments | Create New Account
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10.5: Fix Transparent Dock and invisible Stack problems
Authored by: ppavel on Apr 03, '08 09:41:13AM
Transparent Dock problem can be cured by the following command:

killall Dock

This will kill the Dock and it will instantly restart. This will not cause logout

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10.5: Fix Transparent Dock and invisible Stack problems
Authored by: rogov on Apr 04, '08 06:37:30PM

Unfortunately, killing/restarting the Dock doesn't address the transparency/invisibility problem.



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10.5: Fix Transparent Dock and invisible Stack problems
Authored by: stevelup on Apr 27, '08 10:29:45AM

I concur. I get this problem about once a week and killing the dock does not resolve it.

Logging out and back in again cures it for me.



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10.5: Fix Transparent Dock and invisible Stack problems
Authored by: Anonymous on Apr 03, '08 11:58:34AM

Furthermore, WindowServer is supposed to terminate and relaunch when the last GUI user logs out before giving the login screen again. One should try that graceful approach first before killing the process.



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