Perpetual "Background Items Added"

going here and following the steps solved it for me. https://www.droidwin.com/remove-deleted-apps-from-background-login-items-in-ventura/

Thank you, deleting the items from Library\LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons, then restarting, worked for me.

In Library/LaunchAgents delete the relevant .plist files. Then in Terminal, run this command

sfltool resetbtm

and reboot.

This fault is a serious Pain-in the ***. I cleaned out my Launch items in ~/Library, turned off the Login Items as suggested, and just get the same notifications piling up on my screen, advising me to turn them on! This is OS-wide and needs a fix from Apple, not just a workaround.

Joseph Siegrist is the developer for LastPass. Do you have that installed?

For some reason Apple is showing the developer's name instead of the app's name. Tell Apple what missing features you'd like restored or new features added to the system via Feedback - macOS - Apple.  

For any others just do a Google search for "xxxxx software for mac".

slps01 wrote:

I am still receiving notifications from several of the items that I didn't trash (Adobe, Microsoft, etc).

It would be helpful if you could start your own thread and describe the problem in detail.

And I don't say that in an offhanded, get-away-from-here-you-threadjacker kind of way. I mean it would be really, really helpful to have a detailed description of your specific problem. Describe exactly what changes, if any, that you've made in this new interface. Describe exactly what those notifications say. Screenshots are immensely helpful. Please be thorough. If you get 5 notifications, 5 screenshots would be really nice.

I realize that many problems look the same. Maybe the are the same. But something is clearly wrong. Most people don't see this at all. So why are you seeing it and most other people are not. It may, indeed, be a Ventura bug. But since most people don't see it, maybe we can figure out why you are seeing it.

I can't emphasize this enough. For these kinds of problems, these "me too" replies are totally useless. They are often worse than useless because people get angry and then refuse to provide any kind of debugging or diagnostic information. When that happens, nobody gets any closer to the answer. People then wait eagerly, applying every single software update, waiting for a fix that is never, ever going to arrive.

I wonder where the Apple support staff is hiding; they certainly were unable to deal with this.

Apple support can only deal with common problems that are already addressed with Apple support documents. These kinds of issues require "engineering" support, which is extremely difficult to get. And even when they tell you the problem has been escalated to engineering, that probably isn't true.

You can send product feedback to Apple, where you issue will be aggregated and maybe addressed in 2-3 years. Or you can write an official bug report, where, if you are really lucky, your bug may be fixed in 6-12 months. And even then, you have to supply copious amounts of information. Let's be honest here. You have to find the cause of the bug and tell them how to reproduce it. Anything else, they are just say they can't reproduce it, look at your 3rd party system modifications, and move on to the next one.

I have a good example. iOS 16 included a severe bug in HealthKit, documented in this forum. iOS is a major platform for Apple, not like macOS. While this bug didn't affect most people, it was really embarrassing. It wasn't just some strange edge case. Somebody really dropped the ball. Not counting 3 months of beta release. It took 3 months of general release to get this bug fixed. I found the problem and fixed it in about 30 minutes. I'm only saying that to show you how drop-dead easy it was to fix this bug. They literally don't get any easier that this one and it took 6 months to fix it. The bug being described in this thread is many times more difficult to diagnose and solve.

hollistonma wrote:

However even when enabled, I receive the notification and VMWare will show up on the list of apps as I previously showed. Once I shut down VMWare, VMWare disappears from the "Allow in the Background" list (again, I have not disabled it). Once I use VMWare again, I receive the notification and VMWare will show up on the list of apps in "Allow in the Background" list.

Well that's very interesting. That means that VMWare simply isn't compatible with Ventura. You wouldn't have noticed this kind of behaviour before Ventura. You would think that VMWare would have noticed since Ventura was first released to developers six months ago.

kildabit wrote:

1. I've tried to clear folders:

Macintosh HD/Library/LaunchAgents

2. Macintosh HD/Library/LaunchDaemons

3. Empty Bin

4. Restart

Just so people know. This is not a solution. This is only corrupting 3rd party software you had previously installed. Whether you need those 3rd party apps or not is a separate question. If all you want is for the notifications to go away. You don't ever want to use any of that software that you had downloaded and possibly paid for, then go ahead.

Deleting the properties files in the LaunchAgents folders worked for me.

@etresoft Have you seen the described behavior first-hand? Have you tried deleting the launch agents? Do you have any first-hand tests to back up your assertion: "Nope. Not gonna work."

I would be interested to know if anyone who has actually tried this solution has had a bad outcome.

It would be a very good idea to do a time machine backup before doing this JUST IN CASE. But at the very least @etresoft is wrong in some cases when he says "will have no effect or cause damage."

Not if you have deleted parts of it. You just haven't exercised any of the functionality that is now broken.

You are suggesting that the plist files contain not just startup commands and prefs, but code required by applications to work, and that deleting the plist files could cause not just (at worst) an immediate failure requiring a restart or possibly a re-install of one non-compliant application, but a slow or delayed degradation of the application with access to that code, and that deleting plist files will cause ongoing problems and may affect not only that one application, but other applications or the OS. Is that what you're saying? Because that's certainly what it sounds like. I would really like to know if things have changed because In addition to being a designer, I have been doing freelance IT support for the last 10 years. Deleting plist files is one of the troubleshooting steps I use when applications (particularly Adobe apps) are having odd freakouts. I learned to do this from Adobe Teams Support. While it hasn't always fixed the issue that prompted me to delete the prefs, it has never caused a drawn out series of problems to pop up, and has yet to cause things to get worse than whatever problem I was trying to fix in the first place. At the worst, I've gotten a request to reinstall an auto-updater (as I did with the Microsoft auto-updater in this case--a prompted, one click process) or had to re-customize user preferences that had been reset to their defaults.

The problem of a dozen or more notifications that cannot be batch dismissed popping up on every restart and some app launches is probably worth fixing for most people. Many of the arguments against the approach of deleting the autolaunch plist files seem to suggest that it will cause more problems than just the theoretical possibility of needing to reinstall an application. That's not how it works.

For me, deleting the plist files didn't damage any applications. I'm using:

• Adobe Creative Cloud (all prefs were preserved)
• Chrome
• One Password - I didn't even have to reconnect to my account which can be slightly annoying (although I did have to re-pin the browser extension so its icon showed up)
• MS (Teams, Word, Outlook, Excel and Edge)
• Stream Deck (the login item for this seems to be labeled "Corsair Memory" - I had to quit and restart this one and got a prompt to reinstall the login item.
• Jamf Connect
• Chrome (Google Updater)

Not listed in Login items, but I thought might have a chance of being affected:

• Network settings
• VPN settings
• Default Folder

I can just imagine one of my users searching for a solution to this problem and after reading this thread thinking they had to live with or have me fix it because this simple solution was going to cause data loss or burn everything down.

Jeremy Bolesky wrote:

You are suggesting that the plist files contain not just startup commands and prefs, but code required by applications to work, and that deleting the plist files could cause not just (at worst) an immediate failure requiring a restart or possibly a re-install of one non-compliant application, but a slow or delayed degradation of the application with access to that code, and that deleting plist files will cause ongoing problems and may affect not only that one application, but other applications or the OS. Is that what you're saying?

Yes. That's correct.

Deleting plist files is one of the troubleshooting steps I use when applications (particularly Adobe apps) are having odd freakouts.

Don't do that.

While it hasn't always fixed the issue that prompted me to delete the prefs, it has never caused a drawn out series of problems to pop up, and has yet to cause things to get worse than whatever problem I was trying to fix in the first place. At the worst, I've gotten a request to reinstall an auto-updater (as I did with the Microsoft auto-updater in this case--a prompted, one click process) or had to re-customize user preferences that had been reset to their defaults.

I think you are confusing launchd plist configuration files for preference files. Technically, they are both "plist" or "property list" files. But that's where the similarity ends. The launchd plist configuration files define which helper apps, background daemons, licensing servers, etc. are launched and under what circumstances. They are literally part of the app. If they are deleted, then the app won't run properly. In some cases, the launchd tasks are used just for auto-updates, but in other cases, they constitute the fundamental functionality of the software.

That being said, you shouldn't even delete preference files either, except maybe in very specific circumstances. There is actually a system launchd daemon that manages all preferences. The proper way to hack or delete preferences is to use the "defaults" tool. But even then, there may be running apps that still have the old preferences. Therefore, you also have to do a "killall" on all "cfprefsd" tasks. But even that isn't ideal. If you really want to reset preferences, you should delete the plist files while either logged out of the user account (for user-level preferences) or while booted in recovery (for system-level preferences).

The problem of a dozen or more notifications that cannot be batch dismissed popping up on every restart and some app launches is probably worth fixing for most people. Many of the arguments against the approach of deleting the autolaunch plist files seem to suggest that it will cause more problems than just the theoretical possibility of needing to reinstall an application. That's not how it works.

It is not a theoretical possibility, it is an absolute certainty. Deleting the plist files corrupts the app. What happens to an app that has system extensions running but no daemons to control it? I don't know. You don't know either. You've listed maybe six apps. The only one of those that I use is Microsoft and I'm pretty sure deleting the licensing daemon will cause it to stop working. If not, then I guess I wasted my money with that subscription I just paid the other day. I'm such a sucker, eh? But regardless, there are thousands of apps. Making any kind of blanket recommendation based on your experience with a handful is not a good idea.

The best idea is to stay out of threads like this where people might post advice that only works in certain circumstances and could cause serious problems in other cases. Instead, users should start new questions for their own, specific problems. Then, if you know for certain they are only using apps that can be safely hacked as you describe, you can then make that recommendation, and tell them to make sure to keep checking with the developer and reinstall the app once it is updated to work better with Ventura.

This is an Apple OS issue. Hopefully, the next update will fix it.

Updating software does not work. Nor does deleting anything.

It's simply a matter of the OS reporting things that it does not need to report — and the user having no way to turn it off.

Reinstalling apps does help.

I've managed to get rid of all of my notifications, bar one.

However, this is not something we should be working around — it's an Apple bug, plain and simple.

It needs to be fixed.

There is alot of blabber here on this site but elisatems is the only one who knows what she is talking about. Her solution worked really well. You have to find the two different "library files" and in one of them I found these ****** G2M files. Once deleted everything went away, both the notices and it also deleted the presence of the G2M file that shows up in the Background section of "open at Login inside the General File of Settings!

This is working so far for me! I had Corel Corporation constantly trying to load a help file for Painter. I found it in both the launchagents and launchdaemons. I deleted and restarted and no more load attempts for me running Ventura 13.2.1 on an a 2017 Macbook...Thanks!