Auto hiding apps in mountain lion and now mavericks

I don't know whether I understand your answers. We have to be crystal clear, or there's no chance of solving this problem.

1. You did, or did not, have the problem while in safe mode and logged in to your account?

2. You did, or did not, have the problem while logged in to the guest account?

If you're not 100% sure, please repeat the tests.

Automatic Termination is a relatively recent feature of OS X. Although still supported, Word and Excel may be at end of life. They are built against an old version of the OS and do not support modern OS features. Are you using multiple spaces? Office really gets confused by Spaces.

You wrote in your original question that the background applications are hidden, not right away, but after a delay of 30 seconds. Are you sure that's accurate?

Are all applications affected, or only some?

When the applications are hidden, do you still see a white dot underneath their Dock icon, indicating that they're running?

Taking this story at face value, I can't make any sense out of it. On the other hand, you have a lot of strange-looking login items, and it would make a lot of sense if one of them was causing the problem. So I question whether you really did test in safe mode.

Back up all data.

Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginitems.plist

Right-click or control-click the line and select

Services ▹ Reveal in Finder (or justReveal)

from the contextual menu.* A folder should open with an item selected. Move the selected item to the Desktop, leaving the window open. Log out, log back in, and test. If there's no change, quit again and put the item you moved back where it was, overwriting the one that may have been created in its place. Otherwise, delete the item you moved. Recreate your list of login items a few at a time, testing at each step, until you find the culprit.

*If you don't see the contextual menu item, copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. In the Finder, select

Go ▹ Go to Folder...

from the menu bar, paste into the box that opens (command-V). You won't see what you pasted because a line break is included. Press return.

Evernote, etc. all (or most) have 'Show In Menu Bar' options in their individual preferences to check. Go through them all and uncheck that option.

Pete

The menu bar items are not determined by the login items.

One of the login items is causing the problem. Finding out which one is a tedious process of elimination.