Can anyone explain this strange Dock problem?

Hi guys,
I have to first ask, "Is it me?" before I start throwing the blame at either my Mac Mini or the OS.
Here's the deal.
I have the dock set up so that it fills the bottom of the screen with icons when I hover the mouse down there. The icons are fairly large because I have removed a lot of the default items which I will never use. When the mouse isn't down there, the whole dock disappears.
It all works fine until the time I take my mouse pointer down there to bring up the dock and nothing happens.
No dock appears at all. Not even a jetty shows it's head.
I have found through trial and error that the only way to fix it is to go to the Apple icon at top left and click on it. Then click on Dock and then "Position on Left" (or anything other than "Position on bottom". Then I have to move the mouse to the edge that I chose to produce the dock. Next is a reversal by clicking the Apple >> Dock >> Position on Bottom and it all goes back to working as it should ..... until the next time.

Any ideas?

Go to /Users/yourname/Library/Preferences and delete these 2 files /com.apple.dock.plist
and com.apple.dock.db.plist Then restart. This will give you the default Dock, so you'll have to reset yours the way you like it

iram ... Thank you for the reply but I fell at the first hurdle.
Could you please explain where I would find /Users/?
I can't see it on the toolbar. It isn't in Apple prefs or the main HDD that I can see.
Can you tell I'm new? lol

Click on Finder, then Library..then preferences .. I didn't know you were new. Before that check in system preferences under the apple, top left.
Click on Dock, make sure automatically show and hide dock isn't checked off. My settings

jram said:

Click on Finder, then Library..then preferences ..

Click to expand...

That omits the critical location: The User Folder. That's the one with the little white house icon, named by the user. So, you want this path:

Hard Drive/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences

then find the com.apple.dock.plist and the other similarly named file and move them to the Desktop, as suggested.

That's true , I missed the little house