Desktop/Dock problem

Hi...my Desktop has gone all strange on me. The Dock has disappeared, the Desktop picture has been replaced by a flat blue and the various icons on the Desktop are surrounded by heavy black frames which once you click anywhere, grow in size so that the whole icon area becomes a black background. Also, the minimize button no longer works. When I go to System Preferences>Desktop, SP just 'quits unexpectedly'. I've tried the Hardware Test disc, no problems found. Everything else seems to work fine - eg I can go to hard disc, open Applications and start things from there. But I'd like my Desktop and Dock back. I'd greatly appreciate any ideas, comments etc from anybody. Cheers, Chris G.

Hmmm, well the imaging issues sound like the contrast has been turned up in the 'visual aids' dialogue.

If System preferences won't open for you, download a tool off versiontracker.com (forgotten the name - I'll look it up later) that lets you install only the parts off the panther disc that you need (in your case sys. prefs.)

I had a similar problem once where system prefs would crash when I opened the deesktop dialogue...that fixed it for me..

Thanks for this, I'll check it out later, let you know what happens.

Try restarting the computer and repairing disk permissions

Made some progress, got Dock and Desktop back - it was a .plist problem of some sort and to be honest I don't quite know what I did to fix it! However, Sys Prefs still crashes when I click on Desktop settings, so will persevere with following the various bits of advice. Thanks to everybody who responded, great help and good for the morale!

The app you need to reinstall your system preferences is called pacifist (www.versiontracker.com)

It'll let you reinstall the parts of OS X you need to fix...

Hey that's great - everything now fixed ( I think!). What a useful and easy to use utility - thanks for that, Cheers, CG