Mission Control in Yosemite Creates Tons of Spaces/Desktops

Does this happen for a different user, e.g., Guest?

Does this happen when starting up in Safe Mode?

I read these forums a lot and I've not seen this one before. Of course it is possible that I just missed it, and it's possible it's an OS bug, but given the rarity of its occurrence it's more likely to be something like a third party software conflict. The Guest user or safe mode stuff is meant to test out that hypothesis. Logging in as a different user removes any user-specific third party modifications. Starting up in safe mode disables third party system modifications.

Same issue here. Every few days I look and I will have 40+ empty desktops loaded in spaces that I never intended to have. I have to manually close them. Can not figure out why this is happening yet.

My wife, my best friend and my therapist said I was crazy but NO I'm not the only one with this issue!!

I have Yosemite 10.10.3 (14D136) Mac Pro (Early 2009) Dual 24" monitors, lots and lots of Spaces. Been happening since switching to Yosemite, did an upgrade not a new install.

I also have the same problem. I'm on a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, early 2013) running Yosemite. I've had the same problem in 10.10.2 and 10.10.3, maybe 10.10.1 - don't know. Whenever I look at Mission Control, I have extra Spaces that I didn't create (on purpose). I run Parallels every day, and connect to an external Apple 27-inch at various times - connect, disconnect, go to meeting, connect to projector/display, disconnect, back to office and my 27-inch, etc., etc. And sometimes work at home connecting to a non-Apple 24-inch monitor. If I don't look in Mission Control, everything's fine, but when I do, I get spooked that I'm wasting huge amounts of space keeping track of all the Spaces that have been created. And you can't delete them en-mass, have to delete them one at a time, which can take quite a while if you've accumulated over a hundred. (When I first discovered this, I had over 100.) Now I look every day or so and always see at least 4-5 empty extras.

How can I / we stop this proliferation of unwanted Spaces?

Have you tried setting up another admin account to see if the same behavior is there? Tried the Safe Mode?

Safe Mode - About

Safe Mode - Yosemite

I have proliferating Spaces, and it's part of another overall muck-up of multi-screen support. I'm on an iMac 27" circa 2013 with a smaller "HD" screen next to it. I used to use the small screen as the "main" screen with the menu bar, etc. When I updated to Yosemite, the dual-screen support was so broken that I moved the "main" screen to the 27". This change has not propagated nor remained in place in other users, even when I've set it that way on a per-use basis.

I'll enumerate my other problems elsewhere. Regarding multiple Spaces, here's what I see:

• In my Regular User account, I have 3 Spaces for the smaller screen and 4 Spaces for the large one. Often (but not always) when I logout and log back in, all but one Space is moved from the small screen to the larger one. And an extra Space is tacked on the end.
• In my Admin account, no matter how many times I've changed the arrangement from small=Main to large=Main, it reverts when I log off. When I log back in and I have multiple Spaces defined, they all get moved to the Main screen (which switches to the small one) with an extra one tacked on.

I seem to have fixed it under Mission Control - I disabled "Displays have separate Spaces"

While I liked having separate Spaces for each display, I prefer having the Spaces assigned predictably to my displays. Often (but not always) when I logged in, I'd find that Yosemite had moved the Spaces from the extra display to the main display. It also added one or two extras to the collection, as noted in this thread.

These noxious behaviors appear to have ceased since disabling separate Spaces.

I disabled "Displays have separate Spaces" and still had 40 Desktops. I just removed 36 of them manually :-( and at least did not get a new one on boot-up.

Not sure if that when they appeared for me... thanks for the suggestion.

Hi,

I disabled the setting too but now I have the problem that I have to close 254 spaces.

Everytime i hover over the one i want to delete and move to the "(x)" it's jumping to another space..

Does anyone know a command line to close every space?

Deleting dashboard, desktop and dock plists with a killall Dock doesn't help...

This problem was reported in the following thread as well:

Mission controll spawning over 90 empty desktops...

I have had this problem since Yosemite and I have to remember to periodically check and close the spaces that have piled up. Real pain when you get a lot of them.