Help required: can't turn off 'hide others' or single-app mode

After installing Lion, whenever I alt-tab or use Quicksilver to move to another app, the application I had been using is hidden.

I believe it may be something to do with 'hide others' vs 'show others'. At first whenever I switched to another app, all other apps would be hidden - I couldn't get two different apps to be visible at the same time - really challenging my sanity!

I was able to get a slight improvement by running the following script.

defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool false
osascript -e 'tell application "Dock" to quit'

After this I was able to see certain combinations of applications at the same time, e.g. now I can alt-tab between TextEdit and Preview and have both visible every fourth alt-tab, but the other three (in a sequence of 4) simply switch between the two while hiding the other.

Other application combinations (e.g. iCal and TextEdit) never allow me to see both together. iCal doesn't seem to want to share the UI with any other app at all.

Is this a bug? If someone could please restore my sanity I'd be grateful!

Galen

BTW, I have tried "Show All" from Finder - all apps then become visible, but the first time I switch to another app they all disappear again.

Another problem that may be related, when I swap Spaces on my normal login account, when I move back to a space, the foreground app changes so they are not as you left them - very annoying, have given up on using Spaces and Mission Control.

Have tried logging in a different user and this doesn't happen - spaces behave as you would expect, AND I can see all my apps at the same time (no hiding of non-foreground apps as per my original problem).

So I'm thinking this must be configuration somewhere - or perhaps my user configuration is broken somehow and I need to recreate my user account... hoping not, that one has just been migrated across from each of my previous 3 Macbook Pros, so not sure all the changes I would need to make to recreate it.

Solution?

Have you found a solution? I have a client with the same exact problem and can't solve it. Tried changing the dock plist file single-app line to false to no avail. It's something in the user prefs I'm sure because it's only for this one user on this computer...

problem solved

it was a checkbox in the Quicksilver settings... My clue was that you also had Quicksilver running...