[Mercymight]

The blue indicator lights on my dock have all disappeared, except the one under the Finder icon. I read somewhere that I should go to Preferences, Dock and then I could click on a choice for indicator lights, but I don't get this choice. I also read about quitting Dock and reinstalling it but I don't know how to do this (elderly non-techie person).

This is a MacBook OS X 10.5.8 and I have recently had a new hard drive.

Can I fix this myself? I would be very grateful for help.

[fisherKing]

you could try this:
go to your home folder (the one with your NAME), go to the library, find the preferences folder and find these files:

com.apple.dock.db
com.apple.dock.plist
com.apple.finder.plist

move them to the desktop, restart your mac; see if that helps.

if it DOESN'T, you can always put those files BACK in the prefs folder, (you'll be asked to replace the new files there, say YES), then restart again.

anyone else have a different suggestion??

[chabig]

if you click once on any one of the icons in the dock, does that make the blue light under it come on?

[Mercymight]

Thank you chabig and fisherKing for your replies. I am very grateful for the trouble you've taken. I feel like someone who's taken the car to the garage with a fault that immediately disappears - the blue lights have reappeared and I have no idea what made them go or come back. Thanks again.

[Spheric Harlot]

The blue lights, as you yourself say, are "indicators".

They indicate whether an application is running or not.

Thus, if you haven't actually launched an application yet (as after a restart), the indicator will obviously be off.

Don't worry about them - they're going away in Lion. As your query proves, they are mostly irrelevant to regular use, and a source of needless confusion. With Lion's instant-suspend and restore for applications, the idea of "quitting" or "launching" an application becomes meaningless, completely obsoleting these lights.

[SkipperMac]

I just ran into the problem of the indicators disappearing for running apps. I changed no settings, did nothing to reconfigure. The real worrisome thing was that task switching via Cmd-Tab showed only Finder. I had 5 or 6 apps running. Expose would split out and show everything fine, and I could switch that way, but cmd-tab, nothing, and no indicators except for Finder.

I just restarted and all has returned to normal, but I'm a bit worried because I"ve been battling the google redirect virus on the XP/Bootcamp side and am kind of nervous about getting invaded on the Mac side. Don't know if this is possible, but the worm on the xp side is pretty difficult to get rid of.

Anyone else have this happen one-off?

[Waragainstsleep]

It won't affect your Mac side. If it happens again, reinstall your OS.