mac boots up with volume window open

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Level 1

16 points

mac boots up with volume window open

I saw a similar question was posted about a year ago but did not see a solution. Here's the problem. Before I (cleanly shut down), I close ALL windows, giving me a nice clean desktop. This is how it should look the next time I boot, but the boot volume ALWAYS displays an open window on the desktop. It's always where I last left it, but I don't want it displaying at all. I've deleted the finder prefs file, the desktop .DS_Store file, the volume's .DS_Store file and various other files, all to no avail. If I boot up under a different user account, the window does not open, so it's something local to my account. I've even thrown caution to the winds and deleted all sorts of invisible files, with no change. The window refuses to stay closed. Arrrgh! Suggestions? Thanks.

Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Posted on Jul 24, 2011 3:12 PM

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Answer 1

BDAqua

Level 10

238,979 points

Jul 24, 2011 3:29 PM in response to mgeller47

Safe Boot , (holding Shift key down at bootup), use Disk Utility from there to Repair Permissions, move these files to the Desktop.

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktop.plist

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.recentitems.plist

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist

Then reboot once more.

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Answer 2

mgeller47 Author

Level 1

16 points

Jul 24, 2011 6:15 PM in response to BDAqua

Thanks for the suggestions, but it still screws up. I'd already done everything other than the safe boot step, but that made no difference. Although it did take four times as long to boot up in safe mode as in normal mode, the fan stayed on the whole time and disk i/o was continuous. It also put some files in the trash, I'll ASSume I don't need them. This is really getting annoying. It's only been in the last month or so, and I don't think I've added anything to my computer during that time. I've also run the disk utility a few times to verify the disk structure. Strange.

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Answer 3

BDAqua

Level 10

238,979 points

Jul 24, 2011 6:26 PM in response to mgeller47

Yeah, you don't need those files.

I won't have 10.4 available again until torrow to look for the possibble file.

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Answer 4

mgeller47 Author

Level 1

16 points

Aug 11, 2011 9:56 AM in response to mgeller47

Found it! Finally. The problem was the loginwindow.plist file. For some reason, it had "/" as one of the items to start up along with my login apps. Weird. Deleted that entry out of the plist file and everything's back to normal.

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Answer 5

BDAqua

Level 10

238,979 points

Aug 11, 2011 11:04 AM in response to mgeller47

Great work, thanks for the report! 🙂

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