site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com Just FYI, there are three processes associated with the login screen: o loginwindow manages a login session o authorizationhost hosts privileged (non-GUI) authorization plug-ins S+E -- Quinn "The Eskimo!" <http://www.apple.com/developer/> Apple Developer Relations, Developer Technical Support, Core OS/Hardware _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-kernel mailing list (Darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-kernel/site_archiver%40lists.a... At 06:07 -0700 27/10/09, Michael Crawford wrote: Does the login screen have some particular process name? o SecurityAgent hosts GUI authorization plug-ins, one of which actually displays the login GUI Perhaps you could poll for its existence, then sleep a few seconds, and iterate until it appears. This is not a good idea. Since the introduction of launchd, the user space portions of Mac OS X boot on demand. launchd starts loginwindow, and loginwindow then demand pulls in all the other services. Hence, the existence of the login process does not give you a good indication that startup is complete. For the first N seconds of its life, the login process is blocked pulling in the various services it needs. This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com