Links in Dock Not Appearing and Youtube not Playing

Hello Mac Forums,

I'm actually a longtime mac user and fan, but I don't know much beyond what's on the surface. Recently two odd things have started happening on my imac running OS Lion.

First, for several months now, youtube videos have not been working in Safari. I get a loading wheel that eventually freezes; the sound will then come on, and even keep playing for a few seconds after I've quit Safari. This continues even though I've updated Flash to the latest version; the videos run fine in Firefox.

Second, just this week, the links I have saved in my dock (those gray springy things) have vanished. The space still appears in the dock and I can hover over them to see what they are, but they themselves are invisible.

Any ideas about what might be wrong, first with Safari, and second with the finder? Thanks for the help.

Hmmmm. You may have some corrupt preferences, or maybe the cache needs to be rebuilt. Or maybe it's a permissions issue. First thing to try is run Onyx and use the full suite of maintenance and cache cleaning tools. It does have an option to delete the browser cache, so do that in addition to the system and user caches. Run the various modules to repair permissions, verify/repair disk, and so on. Let's see if that fixes it before moving on.