Two unrelated events conspired to point out anther reason to not be too hasty jumping on the OS Update band wagon. First, another person was confuse about what the "check mark" does in the list of Login Items. That was easy to clear up ( again ). While confirming my understanding of this point, I noticed there were two iterations of "GrowlMenu" in the list. One showed a path starting with the hard drive and ending in my user Preferences. The other simply started the path at "MyUserName" and ended in the same exact place. Something isn't right about that.
I deleted the one with the longer path...We'll see what happens. I'm not particularly fond of Grow notifications, anyway...
Then, on visiting MFI, I see they are suggesting checking the Login Items list
before making an OS/Security update. Some of these items, normally third-party ones can prevent the normal restart after one of those major updates. It usually takes several attempts before one realizes the problem may be in the Login Items and gets the offending item out of there.
Of course, one never really knows when an item
will cause a problem, but it's probably a good idea to either remove any suspect items before doing the install and replace them one at a time after a successful restart. I think it is certainly a good idea to check the Login Items list at least weekly, especially if one likes to install apps to judge their usefulness. Once you give any required approval in an installation process, you may never know that something was installed in the list unless you actually look to see. Same for dumping apps, most don't come with
deinstallers, you simply drag their folder into the trash. However, they may have put a file in the Login Items that also needs to be removed.
Just another minor step to perform regularly that may make your next OS update smoother.
