Why does Dock magnification just quit sometimes?

Sometimes the magnification effect on my dock will just stop working out of the blue for some reason. I've gone into system preferences and the effect is still checked, but still doesn't work. Any ideas about this?

edit - It will start working again when I restart, but this is kind of a pain so I was wondering if there is any other way.

Try a permissions repair.

I to sometimes get this issue,(also does it with auto hide) I just let it be until it starts working again (i don't think this is an overload of the system as I have a 1.5ghz powerbook and a quad g5, and it does it on both). You can try the above advice of repairing permissions... although it did not do anything on my system, but you might get lucky. on mine its just time (or a restart) hopefully somebody else on the forums actually knows what it is.

Thanks for the quick replies. What exactly is a permissions repair, and what does it do. I'm new to Macs, I've had this one for only about a month and a half.

the permissions to certain files get changed while using them, repairing permissions makes sure they are set to the correct permissions so they can accesses as needed. repairing permissions is done is disk utility. This can be found by either spotlighting it.. or you can go to the "go" menu in finder, and click utilities then you will scroll down to where the disk utility is located. Once in disk utility click on repair permissions and it will do just that. It does not take long, a few minutes max.

Alright, thanks. I'll try that.

It didn't work. Any other ideas?

are you using Transparent Dock? this happens to me occasionally, i always thought it had to do with Transparent Dock. When it would happen to me i go into that program and it has an option to restart the dock so i do and it works again. that way i dont have to restart the whole computer, just the dock, and it only takes a few seconds

Go into the terminal and type "killall Dock" it will restart the dock and should fix the problem. Make sure you capitalize Dock or it won't do anything.