I've been having an issue lately where my Dock service freezes the system, and I think I've tracked down the MySQL part of XAMPP as the culprit. Here are the exact symptoms:
Cmd-Tab does not work
Expose / Mission Control Spaces does not work.
Notification Center is frozen
Hidden dock will not appear
The .db files in ~/Library/Application/Support/Dock/ are accessed constantly (as shown by fseventer)
I can fix all these problems immediately by doing the following:
sudo /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/xampp stopmysql
killall -9 com.apple.dock.extra
killall -9 Dock
But they usually happen again as soon as I restart MySQL. Anyone else encountered this, or know of a fix? Is it possible that it's related to some specific SQL database on my system? I tried creating a new OS user account, and the same problem happens there.