Missing Dock Icons - Snow Leopard

I, like many people recently made the upgrade to Apple's new version of their operating system, Snow Leopard. While on the surface not much has changed (other than a few UI tweaks and bug fixes) its the under the hood features such as OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch that give this the possibility of being a great operating system once developers start utilising the new technologies.

Although many of you may have performed the upgrade option from your existing Leopard installation I opted for a completely clean install with a freshly formatted drive. While the installation process went very smoothly and was particularly fast, one of the problems I noticed upon start-up was a lot of the application icons were missing, just leaving blank spaces in the Dock, Finder and when switching applications with cmd+tab. This makes for very difficult navigation between applications.

Fortunately there was a easy fix for this. It just involves locating the "com.apple.dock.db" file in "~/Library/Preferences/" (where ~ is your homespace), deleting it and then restarting your computer. I moved it to the desktop just to keep a backup in case anything did go wrong, but just make sure you remove it from your preferences folder.

Once you have restarted, the dock icon database will be rebuilt, creating a fresh copy of the file in your preferences and hopefully all you icons will be back to normal!