Restored 10.4.10 image exhibits strange behavior

[Derekasaurus]

To answer your questions:

1) As far as my dock misbehaving "a couple of hours" after restoring, I'm referring to my dock icons suddenly pointing to wrong targets or their icons turning into blank documents when I click them. For example my DVD Player dock icon worked just fine for a while after restoring, but when I clicked it a few hours later it suddenly opened some random system folder instead of launching the DVD Player. It worked for a while, then stopped working.

2) Photoshop CS3 had an "internal error" the first time I launched it, but then it started just fine the second time. This error happened after the first time I restored, but not the second, so this is not a repeatable problem. The next time it happens I'll see what's going on in system.log. It hasn't happened on the current image of my restored system--only dock icons and links are getting screwed up--so my current system.log does not have this information.

3) Unfortunately the first time I cloned my MBP I named the external drive "Macintosh HD Backup", which is not the same as "Macintosh HD", the default name of the source drive I'm cloning. Since then I renamed my clone to "Macintosh HD" so it matches the original, but the clone was booted once as "Macintosh HD Backup", which sounds like it might be a bad thing.

It seems that to eliminate some possible errors I should rebuild my MBP from scratch (i.e., clean OS X installation) and clone it to an external HDD with the same name as the original (i.e., "Macintosh HD"). Then I'll restore from the clone, reset the LaunchServices database, and use the system to see if the problem resurfaces.

I'll post again if I can't get rid of the problem. I really want to get to the bottom of this before I have to recover for real in an emergency.

Incidentally, in a related post you suggested excluding /Library/Caches/com.apple.LaunchServices.* to another poster. Should I be doing this as well?