[imitchellg5]

I have an odd issue. Recently iChat on my MacBook Pro (running 10.6.2) started opening at login. When I go to Login Items in System Preferences, the only thing their is iTunesHelper. Something else weird: After I wake up from sleep, iChat will sometimes randomly open. Thanks for any help in advance.

[Art Vandelay]

Look in iChat.

[imitchellg5]

Nothing there... "At user login..." is deselected, but it's like it's acting as if it is selected.

[reader50]

Use CronniX to have a look at your crontab. See if iChat has been set to launch there. If you're handy with Terminal, you can skip the download. Just type "crontab -e" to open it in a vi editor.

[imitchellg5]

Interesting, it was. Any idea how that could have happened? Thanks for the help, reader50.

[turtle777]

That's truly odd how it ended up in crontab.

Must have been some app that did that.

-t

[reader50]

My first suspicion would be someone putting it in manually. We do crontabs all the time over in the Team forum, for autolaunching DC clients. But my crontab has always contained only the things I put in.

Applications or scripts could put something in your crontab, but I've not seen any do it. Even a malware exploit would want to launch itself. iChat is a rather random choice to get added to your tab.

Perhaps you (or someone) had to log in via SSH (remote troubleshooting), and needed to launch iChat? If you do it directly, it will quit when you exit your SSH session. You could launch it with nohup, or stick it in the local crontab so cron launches it. This is reaching, btw. Practical joke by a friend makes a lot more sense.

[imitchellg5]

LOL I wonder if my dad did it... the iMac that he often uses has access to all of the Macs in the house via Remote Desktop.

I was also fooling around with some AppleScript for iChat a few days ago, maybe that did it.