Remove Login Items

Do you have any of these apps installed on your Mac?

https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/tim-wilbrink/id412396045

This appears to be his website: https://picoreo.de/index.html

I don't see any Mac apps on the list, but then people can run iOS apps on a Mac these days.

That "Login Items" user interface is very confusing. Although it says "Login Items", for most people having problems, it is referring to Launch Agents and Launch Daemons. Those can be located in:

/Library/LaunchAgents

/Library/LaunchDaemons

~/Library/LaunchAgents

And now in Ventura, they can also be located...practically anywhere else on the hard drive or any connected external drive 😄.

However, that last bit is a new feature. More likely, this item actually is a real "Login Item" and is located inside the app bundle, wherever that happens to be.

If this is a true Login Item, then you can safely disable it using the new Login Items user interface in Ventura. But you should really never make any changes in that user interface. It's dangerous. You just got lucky with this app. It is going to be a few years at least before developers adapt to this new interface allowing end users to disable part of the app. I strongly recommend that you do not disable any other apps. You could cause a stream of never-ending notifications, or perhaps worse.

If there are any apps you don't want to use, I recommend uninstalling them completely. Use only uninstallers or uninstallation instructions provided directly by the developer. Do not use any kind of "app zapper" or "clean up" tool. Do not try to manually delete files. You have some apps installed that could cause serious problems if you attempt to uninstall them improperly. It's a royal mess right now.

hucqym wrote:

Thanks for the hints but none of those apps are installed on my system. I just rechecked.

Do you have anything similar? If this developer ever wrote a Mac app in the past, it is probably pretty similar to their iPhone apps.

And yes, while I have turned it off for security since I don't know what that is

I don't think there is any security concern. The fact that there is a name there means that it was signed by the developer. And I was able to find this particular developer. It is probably just an old app that has been discontinued. Or perhaps the developer wrote it for someone else.

I do have the problem of constant notification.

Just to clarify, because this is a real mess affecting a lot of people, you are getting repeated notifications for "Tim Wilbrink"? I haven't experienced this problem personally. It has been a lot of effort to identify what specific steps people can take just to identify the cause of this problem and to find ways to fix it.

So, can you try an experiment? Can you re-enable this "Tim Wilbrink" item? Then restart, at least twice, and report back if that corrects the repeated notification problem. I'm confident that this isn't a security issue. This app has been running happily for a long time until you upgraded to Ventura. A couple of more reboots with it running won't hurt anything.

All the LaunchAgent/Daemons locations are sanitized so nothing seems to be coming from there.

Now that you mention startup items can be anywhere, that is indeed a royal mess.

I'm sorry to say this, but the mess is far deeper than you realize. Can you please not call it a "startup item"? That could cause confusion for you or other people suffering from the same problem. There used to be a separate thing that was actually called a "startup item". I don't want anyone going off on a wild goose chase looking for ancient startup items. Apple killed those years ago.

Since you haven't found it in the 3 legacy launchd folders, and very few people are using the bundled launchd folders, I'm guessing this is a true "login item". Specifically, it is a "service management login item", as opposed to a "user login item", which is entirely different. 😄

Also, to narrow it down just a bit. The files aren't going to be just "anywhere". They are going to be inside some app somewhere. Apps can be just about anywhere, however. But they will most likely be in:

/Applications

~/Library/Application Support/...somewhere...

~/Applications...rare, but possible

Looking at all the processes in the activity monitor is like a needle in the haystack. Can I somehow filter out all the standard apple processes from that so I can find what third party processes are active?

There is another way...

You can open a new Terminal window. Make the window as big as you can. Then run the following command:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -dump

It will print out a lot of text - a whole lot. Let it run. If you are familiar with the Terminal, don't try anything fancy. This particular tool has a bug that will corrupt the output if you try something fancy.

When it is completely finished, do a search using the Terminal's own search facility for "Tim Wilbrink". That should show you the path to the file. If you could copy and paste that one section for that app in a new reply here, I would really appreciate it. I would just like to confirm that this really is a login item. I'm not entirely sure as it does say "2 items" in your list, which doesn't make sense for a login item. But this is Apple's code. Nothing makes sense.

Joe_Baggadonuts wrote:

I am having the same issue. I ran the command in Terminal then searched for "Wilbrink," but came up with no hits.

Maybe try searching for "RW74269W6X" instead. I think that these developer names only get populated if you have run the app recently. Older apps will only have a "TeamID". However, I think TeamIDs might also change. You still might not find anything. You can also search for "de.tim-wilbrink".

Check if you have an app named OpenSC

Terminal > grep -ril 'Wilbrink' /library

I am having the same issue. I ran the command in Terminal then searched for "Wilbrink," but came up with no hits.