Leopard: Recovering from a Dock Disaster (Like dragging a large number of files to the dock instead of a folder)
Contributed by Rob Rogers 
Tagged: Mac OS X Leopard While the Leopard’s Dock is a amazingly useful tool, it can be rather unforgiving if you have a mishap. For example, I was dragging the photos from Christmas to a folder on my Dock. I missed the folder and now I have a tiny Dock with very tiny icons. Such a mess is a major pain to clean up by removing each image (or file) from the dock. There is an easier way.
1. Open Finder.
2. Go to the home directory for your username.
3. Open the Library folder.
4. Open the Preferences folder.
5. Find and delete the file com.apple.dock.plist.
6. Close the Finder window.
7. Log off and then log back in to your account.
The Dock will return, however it will be the default Dock that you had the first time you booted up your Mac. Make any changes that you want to the Dock. When you are finished, go back and make a copy of the com.apple.dock.plist and save it to another drive. This way you can use it the next time you have a mishap.
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Quinn McHenry said on January 3, 2009
I totally clicked through to see if there was a screenshot… :-)
Actually, though, backing up the dock config is a great idea. It actually seems like it could be a cool way to maintain several different dock configs.
vwhizbang said on February 14, 2009
couldn’t you just restore the plist from Time Machine?
anon said on June 15, 2009
That is if you happen to have a Time Machine backup.
Anonymous said on February 2, 2011
I have this same question, too. Funny story, I was clicking on an alias to a network location, when I sneezed, and instead of clicking on it, pulled it off the dock. Now I don’t remember how to get back to that network location. I have Time Machine backups, so let’s see if I can fix this via Time Machine.
It worked. I had to log out and log back in before I saw the change, but there is my link to my network drive back again! :-)