In Tiger, which I used for a very long time, I almost never accidentally dragged an app from the Dock. Ever since I moved to Leopard, however, it has happened many times. It's too easy in Leopard to accidentally remove apps from the Dock. I don't know the exact steps to reproduce, besides clicking on an app in the Dock, because it's an accident, and I usually don't notice it until later -- like, what in the world happened to Safari, or BBEdit? Occasionally I've noticed it happening live, but I haven't done anything more than click the app in the Dock. Perhaps the mouse moved ever so slightly too or something. I keep my Dock at the bottom of the screen, always showing, approximately 40% on the magnification slider, although I have about 40 items in the Dock, so the actually magnification is minimal. I had the same Dock settings in Tiger as in Leopard. 23-Jan-2009: Engineering has provided the following information: This is from the new look, and there is currently no plan to have it fixed. However, you can defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES. to get the side look for the bottom. 23-Jan-2009 Jeff Johnson: I understand that there's a new look, and I'm not requesting that the new look be changed here. I don't understand the response, though. Is the dragging behavior necessarily tied to the new look? Why can't you fix the dragging behavior while leaving the new look the same? And are you saying that you wouldn't even consider this fix for, say, Mac OS X 10.7? This seems like an odd attitude, especially since I bet that I'm far from the only user experiencing this problem. Indeed, you seem to be aware of the problem and know the cause, so it's a known issue? 02-Apr-2009 Jeff Johnson: Ok, iCal is now missing from my Dock? Do you seriously not think this is a problem? This NEVER happened prior to Leopard. It's really mind-boggling that you wouldn't want to fix this.