Comments on: How to Permanently Prevent OS X 10.7 Lion from ever Re-Opening Apps After a Restart

By: Nancy Drew

Nancy Drew — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 21:03:58 +0000

I followed the instructions exactly, especially taking care to quit all applications. I still get three Sent Mail windows which open every time I restart. I also checked to make sure that Apple Mail wasn’t in the list of “Login Items”. So, this doesn’t always work either.

By: dxo

dxo — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 21:24:18 +0000

Great tip for kiosk computers I’m installing where I need to start up programs in a specific order and timing from my applescript. Apple’s way of doing things was screwing up everything.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 20:37:41 +0000

the methods above did not, or onlypartially worked for me, I found a better way to do this.

open up Terminal and type:

chflags nohidden ~/Library/

Quit all of your apps.
Navigate to here within your home directory ie users/your user name/: ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.loginwindow.*.plist (whereby * is a bunch of characters)

delete this file
reboot computer, it will make a new file with same name

Click the file, do a File > Get Info (or command-I if you’re a pro), and lock it using the Locked checkbox.

this will stop all auto restarts

By: Saedi Folluf

Saedi Folluf — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 16:57:35 +0000

Clearly, 99% of the users do not realize that the checkmark has ABSOLUTELY NO influence on whether the system will restart every single piece of software and document after the system has CRASHED! And the fact that system will gladly relaunch you into the same state from which you crashed and possibly crash you again (if the crash is app or doc related) is the MOST IDIOTIC thing a developer on this planet has ever made a wrong decision to do. I can’t even start imagining what was Apple thinking they’re doing with this CRAP of a misguided “feature”!

By: Eric Magnuson

Eric Magnuson — Fri, 25 May 2012 21:44:38 +0000

I had the same exact frustrations with this, but fortunately Apple just fixed this in the most recent Lion update (10.7.4)! The button now remembers the most recent state (i.e., if you uncheck it, it will stay unchecked the next time the dialogue box opens).

By: Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer — Fri, 25 May 2012 14:30:56 +0000

Fittingly (or is this actual irony?), no matter how many times I mark this entry as read in my aggregator, it keeps popping back up as unread.

By: Doug

Doug — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 04:51:14 +0000

“Another helpful hint as well: Lion, by default, hides your ~/Library/ folder. To make it visible again without showing all of your other invisible files, simply open up Terminal and type:

chflags nohidden ~/Library/”

Hold option and open the Go menu in the finder

By: Justin

Justin — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 19:21:04 +0000

@Philip L: this might be what you're referring to: http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/18/disable-mac-os-x-lion-resume-window-restore/

By: Philip L

Philip L — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 04:45:55 +0000

Great Info. I hate it when Lion does this. One other question though is when opening an application, it seems to open all the past files that were open too. I just want to start a new file! Do you know how to stop this. Similar problem but from within the application.

By: rory

rory — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 17:11:49 +0000

THANKS!!

By: Mel Hogan

Mel Hogan — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 04:43:26 +0000

Great post Mike!

By: Jeff Croft

Jeff Croft — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 21:27:45 +0000

I can’t for the life of me understand why you’d ever want to disable this permanently.

By: Raf

Raf — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 21:14:30 +0000

Brilliant! Now all we need is a way to disable Apple’s forced Autosave/Versioning…

By: Bakari

Bakari — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 04:56:02 +0000

Hey, thanks for this. It’s one of the most annoying features Apple has ever put into an OS upgrade.

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 23:59:40 +0000

Jay: Why would you classify it as a nuclear option? It’s fully reversible, doesn’t require command-line hackery, and is just a matter of locking a preference file. Seems quite harmless to me.

Also, on that thread you linked to, there are some people who say the command line method is not working for them, no?