As it is no fun to work with a Mac without Dock and Finder, which, to add insult to injury, steals your focus every 3 seconds to present you a near useless crash report, I began googling for help.
How?
With the ever-helpful seperate admin account on the machine.
And what did I find?
Reports about corrupt metadata attached by adobe tools to pictures. As Quicklook had a prominent place in the stack traces, this seemed right. But I didn't use any of the mentioned products (CS3,...).
Then I remembered qlmanage, the command line tool to inspect quick look plugin resolution. And behold! For my user account, quick look asked the half-installed bibdesk quick look plugin if it would like to provide a preview of jpgs. The plugin then crashes hard and takes quick look server and the asking application (Finder, Dock,...) down too. Hmmpf!
After removing the broken Bibdesk.app and "qlmanage -r" to reset the quick look generator list, everything works again.
Phew.
My next options would have been re-installing the combo updater for 10.5.2. and, if that failed, reinstall Leopard. Not a welcome thought.
