My dashboard is gone!

Good afternoon everyone.

Today I logged into my macbook and pressed F12 to check the weather as I always do. The screen dimmed like normal, but no widgets were there. The dashboard then immediately went away.

Pressing F12 again brought up the blank dashboard with the plus sign button in the bottom left. I can press that and see a list of available widgets. As soon as I drag one onto the dashboard and let go of the mouse button, however, the dashboard goes away again.

I've tried deleting the dashboard pref files and repairing of permissions, neither have worked. Anyone have any ideas?

Quick update: 3rd party widgets do the same thing. The "Manage Widgets" widget does work; it appears and remains. This is driving me nuts, I don't want to reinstall an OS just because of this seemingly small problem.

Try Pacifist to retrieve them from your OS install disk. See if that works.

Trying now, thanks for the tip.

Gah, it didn't work. To be noted: I have one other permanent account on this machine that I just created from scratch. It too has the same problem. The "Guest User" account's dashboard works great though. I tried copying the guest's dashboard plist into my own but it had no effect.

A visual of the problem:

If you have MainMenu, run the Cleaning scripts for User (All Users) and System (Deep Clean).

Restart in Safe Boot mode and log into your user account. Unplug all unnecessary peripherals including external HDs. Restart normally.

Go to Apple/Support/Downloads and manually download the 10.5.1 update (you ARE running OS X Leopard 10.5.1, right?). Quit ALL applications and install the update. Don't use your Mac while it is installing.

Restart. See if things are ok now. If not, I really can't see what else I could suggest here.

Anyway, report back and we'll see how it goes. Good luck!

Did this happen after you created the other user account?

No, it started before I created anymore accounts. I'll give cleaning the caches a try. On a brighter note I am writing this on my new iPod touch

Sigh, I gave up and formatted. No big deal, nothing like a fresh install to finish up a night. Thanks for the help everyone.