I've been trying to track down a few annoying apps that start up on my iBook and can't be found in any of the usual places. I checked the normal places: the Login Items for my user, LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons, and a few other places... I forgot to check loginwindow.plist.
The specific program in question is /Library/CFMSupport/CNQL2410_ButtonManager.app, which is a little daemon that monitors the buttons of my father's scanner that I rarely borrow. Also, the Version Cue stuff in Adobe CS2 can sit there rather unhelpfully... even though I uninstalled CS2 since leaving my last workplace. (My rant against Installer VISE is a separate issue)
So, the solution is to trash /Library/Preferences/loginwindow.plist. If you ask me, this is a particularly stupid place for startup items to live. I understand that there has to be a place for startup items that aren't dependent on a user logging in, but it damn well shouldn't be a Preferences file. Of course, the solution to this is probably launchd, but the problem is with this idioty little apps that are written by people who obviously haven't read any of Apple's development guidelines.
Incidentally, has anyone ever found a scanner or printer that has decent, HID-compliant driver software for Mac? I don't think such a thing exists. They're all so idiosyncratic and lame, and they completely fail to interface with the OS's built-in facilities.
Anyway, now I'm on the hunt for the DedicatedNetworkBuilds sctwistd culprit. There's a little too much crap lying about in Tiger as it is, and with my iBook running slow, I'm going to trim this as much as possible.
I know this is late, but the problem is (was) that launchd doesn\'t actually work in Tiger for this purpose, even though it was suppsoed to. It does work in Leopard. Blame Apple, not the third-party developers.