Q: After no changes to system, being prompted for keychain passwords until reboot
Good morning Apple universe.
I don't use automatic updates from Apple.
I've seen this occur on a MacBook Pro before, but this time it happened on a Mac Mini running OS X 10.10.5. I've applied no updates or software changes of any kind. Shut the machine down as normal (apple->Shut Down->...). When I turned the machine on the next day, after clicking on a user icon and entering a password, I was prompted for my keychain password numerous times. Since I made no changes I thought this was rather odd. So I continually clicked on Cancel until I was at the desktop. I don't know, maybe one million Cancel clicks...
At this point I knew something had changed without any action from me. So I restarted the machine (apple->Restart...).
The machine restarts, I log in as normal and no keychain prompts. Nice...
Once at the desktop, I noticed there were new icons on my task bar for Maps, iBooks and iPhoto. These are never on my task bar.
At this point, I can only assume one of a few possible scenarios has taken place.
1. Apple silently pushed an update to me.
2. A bug in OS X 10.10.x has caused this.
3. Apple restored something in their cloud and OS X phoned home with missing information.
4. Something more concerning involving remote access to my machine from third parties.
Anyway, I post this here in the hopes that others have encountered something similar and will comment on their experience. This is not specific to the OS X 10.10.5 on my mini. This occurred on my MBP using an earlier version of 10.10.x.
Cheers!
Mac mini, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5), null
Posted on Nov 1, 2015 8:11 AM