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desktop picture suddenly changed by itself

I woke up the morning turned on my mac and booted it to find that the desktop picture was the blue galaxy.


When I shut it down last night it was set to the purple nebula as far as I can recall. I havent enabled "change desktop picture every 30 minutes" so I'm very puzzled as to why it has randomly changed itself. The only I did yesterday was install a couple of Apps from the App store. A photo duplicate finder - and an application uninstaller...



I'm almost wondering if I have downloaded a trojan or back door open - ridiculous I know as my security is pretty paranoid and none of my safeguards has reported anything, nor do I get software from non official sources, but I'm at a loss to figure how this has suddenly changed iteslf... I mean computers don't do that... do they?


Anyone who can explain what has happened I will be very grateful.

MacBook Pro (13-inch Early 2011), OS X Mountain Lion, 4 Gb Ram 512gb HDD

Posted on Aug 28, 2013 1:29 AM

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Posted on Aug 28, 2013 1:33 AM

There's a bug that changes the wallpaper to the default one after each startup. To test this, open System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver, and see if you can open it.


Try deleting the Desktop settings file. Open a Finder window, select Go menu (on the menu bar) > Go to Folder, and type ~/Library/Preferences. Then, delete "com.apple.desktop.plist" and "com.apple.systempreferences.plist", and restart. Finally, change your background

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Aug 28, 2013 1:33 AM in response to jennyd60

There's a bug that changes the wallpaper to the default one after each startup. To test this, open System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver, and see if you can open it.


Try deleting the Desktop settings file. Open a Finder window, select Go menu (on the menu bar) > Go to Folder, and type ~/Library/Preferences. Then, delete "com.apple.desktop.plist" and "com.apple.systempreferences.plist", and restart. Finally, change your background

Aug 28, 2013 1:38 AM in response to mende1

Thank you - except that i've been running mountain lion sicne it was first released and it its only just done this for the very first time last night... so the mystery is really why it suddenly changed rather than - oh its been doing this everytime - because it hasnt! This is the first and only time it has happened.


But I'll try what you suggest.

desktop picture suddenly changed by itself

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