Dock freezes; 4 finger swipe does not work; can't restart
I'm hoping this is the right forum group, but I have an intermittent problem that refuses to resolve itself, and seems to happen randomly (though, at times I think it's when I interact with Firefox - v.3.5.5)
Problem/Issue: Dock freezes, functions like 4-finger swipe on the touch-pad doesn't work (but 2-finger scrolling does), and when I go to restart, the desktop clears like it's shutting down, accept my wallpaper image and the dock remain, and the computer just hangs and won't restart. Not only that, I can't bring it back or cancel the restart sequence, so the only way to get out of this OS purgatory is to do a hard power off. Once I restart, everything is back to normal.
In the initial state, where the dock freezes (and before I try to restart), I'm able to use applications, and navigate menus. Oh, one other thing, alt-tab does not work in this dock-frozen state either. I can select individual windows with the cursor, but not use alt-tab to switch between them. The rest of the keyboard functions work fine.
Today, it seemed to have started when I went to a Firefox window to copy some text from a webpage. As soon as I hit command-c, that seemed to be the triggering event to freeze the dock.
My apologies for the lengthy post, but I figure the more details provide will only help in the diagnosis/resolution.
Thanks for your help.
Macbook aluminum, 13-inch Mac OS X (10.5.8) 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM DDR3
Problem/Issue: Dock freezes, functions like 4-finger swipe on the touch-pad doesn't work (but 2-finger scrolling does), and when I go to restart, the desktop clears like it's shutting down, accept my wallpaper image and the dock remain, and the computer just hangs and won't restart. Not only that, I can't bring it back or cancel the restart sequence, so the only way to get out of this OS purgatory is to do a hard power off. Once I restart, everything is back to normal.
In the initial state, where the dock freezes (and before I try to restart), I'm able to use applications, and navigate menus. Oh, one other thing, alt-tab does not work in this dock-frozen state either. I can select individual windows with the cursor, but not use alt-tab to switch between them. The rest of the keyboard functions work fine.
Today, it seemed to have started when I went to a Firefox window to copy some text from a webpage. As soon as I hit command-c, that seemed to be the triggering event to freeze the dock.
My apologies for the lengthy post, but I figure the more details provide will only help in the diagnosis/resolution.
Thanks for your help.
Macbook aluminum, 13-inch Mac OS X (10.5.8) 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM DDR3