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Login items slow to launch after Lion boots

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Oct 28, 2010
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Hackintosh
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Intel i5 2500k
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ATI 5770
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I've had this problem on two different computers now, and I was wondering if anyone had a solution/fix. Basically, sometimes my login items (e.g. Dropbox, Cloud.app, Alfred, mouse driver, etc.) won't launch that quickly even after I login to Lion and I'm at my desktop.

It's strange because I have a pretty fast system (i5 at 3.4ghz) and my system drive is an SSD. Also, this only happens occasionally. Sometimes they open immediately, and other times it takes upwards of 30 seconds or so. Is this a known issue or does anyone have any idea what might be causing this? It seems to happen at random. Thanks!
 
Do you have a TM setup running?

It could be the system indexing, this should be evident in Activity Monitor.

If you can open Activity Monitor while it is booting you might be able to see if some program is hogging the processor.

Or you can look in the Console and see if it logged any problems during the last boot.
 
Sorry, but what is a TM?

I do think that it might be the system indexing because spotlight has that dot inside of the magnifying glass to indicate that it's not available. Is there any idea how to make this happen less frequently? I don't believe I'm making any significant changes to my system or anything.
 
I think TM = Time Machine.

You could try rebuilding your Spotlight index from scratch - perhaps yours is corrupt, which would explain why OS X spends time refreshing it every time you boot. The freeware tool OnyX can do this for you.
 
Ah, I do have a Time Machine setup that's tied to an external WD hard drive. Is that what's possibly causing the problem?

I don't even have Spotlight indexing much of my system (only my system partition) so I find it odd that it would take that long to index (or would have to even re-index that often). It's not the end of the world, I was just curious if anyone else had experienced this problem and knew of a fix. Thanks!
 
MG is correct TM=Time Machine

Spotlight can index whenever it wants to, I have downloaded or created things, saved and then done a search and Spotlight will find it....already indexed.

You can tell if it is TM if you have the icon in the menu bar, it rotates when backing up. If you leave Activity Monitor open on the desktop when you logout, you should be able to see what is hogging the CPU, if anything.

Or it could be a specific application that you have open once in a while....maybe your e-mail program is checking for e-mail or some such thing that occurs periodically and once in a while coincides with your login.

Sometimes intermittent issues are hard to track down especially when they are not more 'drastic' leaving some evidence of the cause.
 
hi there,
I'm expiriencing the same problem - also on a regular basis. every time I turn my hackintosh on, the login items such as dropbox, sugarysnc, microsoft mousehelper will start really slow (30-40 sec).

in my case the problem seems to be connected somehow to the boot cache. every time I clear the boot cache with onyx, the next time my system starts up all login items as fast as it should.

anybody has an idea how to solve this permanently?

thx
 
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