Advice on troubleshooting daemons and agents is covered in our book Troubleshooting Mac OS X, Leopard Edition.
The move to daemons and agents gained substantial momentum in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard®. Like Startup Items, daemons are background processes that provide services to all users user agents agents for short are background processes that provide services to one or more users. Mac OS X 10.3 Panther® uses the term Startup Items.īeginning in Tiger, the direction has been to replace Startup Items with daemons and user agents managed by the launchd process.Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger®, and later use the term Login Items.The term for account-specific applications or processes launched when a user logs in to their account has varied from Mac OS X 10.2 to 10.4, as follows:.The term Startup Items has been used consistently in Mac OS X for system-wide applications or processes launched at startup and before any users log in to their accounts.The use of the terms Startup Items and Login Items has varied between versions of Mac OS X: Third-party interface modifications hacks or "haxies " and menu extras the icons on the right side of the Apple menu bar under Mac OS X 10.3 and later are often launched as Startup or Login Items. Finder crashes on startup or login, either once or repeatedly.This FAQ, derived from our book Troubleshooting Mac® OS X, provides a procedure for determining if Startup Items or Login Items may be the cause of a problem.Ĭorrupted or incompatible Startup or Login Items can cause a variety of problems, including: