Mac has lost its Dock and menu bar My friend's Mac has lost its dock.

It boots up, apparently fine, she logs in, but is then confronted with a blank screen - as in a desktop background image but no desktop interaction elements.

The dock does not appear, nor does the bar at the top. The problem is similar to Windows when Explorer crashes and you get no OS chrome.

By randomly pressing keys we've been able to make iTunes appear and from there we can get into settings etc. but still no Dock.

Spotlight doesn't work either!

Why might this have happened and how do we fix it?



Specs: MacBook7,1, Mac OS X 10.6.8 (10K549), Darwin 10.8.0.

It would be useful know if there are any default keyboard shortcuts that handle things like 'launch Finder' or 'open Applications folder' - this would be extremely useful as it would make the Mac usable should this happen again.
You can use spotlight (⌘-Space) to do most anything. ⌘⇧A opens Apps folder, ⌘⇧H opens Home folder.

To fix your problem: Try opening the Terminal app (launch via Spotlight). Then type killall Dockand press return. That will attempt to kill the Dock process and relaunch it.

If that doesn't work you can check Activity Monitor (launch via Spotlight) and search for the Dock process to see if it's running at all, and if so, if it's hanging.