How to stop a program making itself a Login Item?

[dannyp1]

I dislike Login Items and am in the habit of removing them in the System Preferences pane. However, I occasionally use at least two programs (BBC iPlayer and Hotspot Shield are the two which immediately come to mind) which reinstate themselves as Login Items every time they're launched.

Is there a quick and easy solution to stopping any program making itself a Login Item? It's tedious to have to go through the same removal process every time I use such a program!

Thanks for any help offered.

 

[miles01110]

Check the program's individual preferences to see if you can stop it from automatically re-adding itself.

 

[larkost]

There are a few steps to go through:

1) As miles01110 said: check to make sure you can't disable this behavior in the apps.

2) If you can't, complain loudly to the app vendor. If you don't complain, the vendor won't change it.

3) As a last resort, could could try setting things up the way you want, then logging out and back in (to make sure the file gets written), and then locking the file ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginitems.plist

You can use the "Get Info" pannel in the Finder to lock the file. Note that this may well have side-effects.