[xdude]

I got a kernel dump and when I restarted all the apps appear as folders in both my dock and the finder. This makes launching an app impossible.

The problem appears to be contained in this one account as logging into root displays everything correctly. Any ideas on how to fix??

Thanks,
xdude

[gorgonzola]

Moving to OS X Usage & Support; click through to find your thread.

thanks

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[the_sisko]

I had the exact same problem. I had a kernel problem, typed in "c" for continue or something like that, and when I logged back in, every .app was displayed as folders in the Dock and in the Finder. Every other account worked fine. I also tried deleting the account with the problem and then creating a new account with the same name, and I still had the same problem.

The two fixes I came up with were creating an entirely different user to log in as (a pain as far as permissions are concerned) or just reinstalling the whole system again. I ended up reinstalling the entire system, which was still a pain for permissions, since I had to change the permissions of every single backed up file that I had. I couldn't find an AppleScript to do that for me automatically.

[xdude]

Allright, I'm back up.

I logged in as root and moved my user account prefs out and logged in again as user. Problem solved. I then went back to root and replaced app specific .plists so I wouldn't have to set everything back up. This also worked.

I don't know which file caused the problem. If it happens again I'll drop them in one by one to see what got corrupt. Just don't have the time to do it now.

Cheers,
xdude

[AirSluf]

The simplest way to fix this is to navigate into the Users>Library>Prefrences folder and trash the three files that start with LS, then restart. Worked great for me (also listed in TIL). You don't loose any prefs this way either.