I've tried every combination of settings I could figure: disabling the "start on login" option in RB while adding it manually to the login items causes RB to remove the item, and if I enable it and order the apps as I want them RB will remove itself from the list and append itself to the end on startup.

My short term solution is to use the "Activate Behaviour on Startup" option which causes RB to activate Plex once it finishes starting. I don't like this approach as it ruins the nice clean startup I had going for some time. A better solution would be an option in RB to have it leave my login items alone, I really don't think the app has any business messing with my system preferences like this!

On a related note, I've noticed that RB is quite a bit slower in starting up. I'm now running an almost stock configuration on a 2010 mini w/ 8gb of mem and a decent HD, but RB still takes 10+ seconds to become active, which is exacerbating the above issue. I wouldn't even notice the slowdown if the app weren't taking focus from Plex (well really it's causing the Finder menu bar to appear over the Plex ui...)

Any tips or direction would be appreciated! 

Remote Buddy should only re-generate its entry in your login items (and re-launch subsequently) when you've checked the "hidden" checkbox of its entry, because - if that option is checked - it will prevent Remote Buddy's menu from appearing.

Regarding startup time:

Actually, Remote Buddy has recently gotten a lot faster during start up, because it now skips the most time intensive part for those of its 100+ Behaviour plugins that aren't needed on a particular system - which is loading them in full.

Please keep in mind that, when you are launching many applications on startup, all of them will launch at once and try to get their application's data from different parts of your HD, causing it to seek around a lot. Seeking a lot, however, will make even the fastest HD crawl. That's also the reason why applications launch much, much faster on SSD-equipped systems: there's no magnetic read/write head that needs to reposition and wait until the platter rotates to the point where the head can read the wanted data from it (which can quickly add up).

Keeping that in mind, chances are that, when you last updated your copy of Plex, Remote Buddy - or any other app you launch at login time, OS X stored their data at a greater distance from each other, increasing the impact of seeking.

Best regards, 
Felix Schwarz 

Thanks for responding, here's my thoughts on the issue:

RemoteBuddy will modify the login items whether the Hidden box is checked or not, I've verified this multiple times. RemoteBuddy will also modify the login items on launch whether I have the option check in the RB preference pane or not which I feel is _bad_ practice. It's one thing to remove the login item when I change the state of your apps preferences, but if I've decided I want to tell RB to _not_ launch at login and then _manually_ add my own login item for it where and how I like- then RB should _not_ be modifying _my_ preferences on the next launch. The ordering of login items launching is CRITICAL to some setups.

You've implemented a "feature" here that is causing a regression for my use to fix a bug I've never had any trouble with- I've always had the Hidden option checked and had no trouble seeing the menu. In my new launch script (my hopefully temporary solution to the login item bug) I tell Finder to hide it and I've still had no trouble with not seeing the menu. The fact that I had to write a script at all was frustrating, none of the 6 other apps my HTPC launches needed any special handling and this change has broken my nice clean startup on the television.

Would it not be a MUCH cleaner approach to simply warn the user if the login item is hidden? The app should _not_ be modifying my preferences, and if I want it to launch hidden then that's my call, perhaps I plan to make it visible later using a script.

As for the launch time, as I mentioned in my post it was nowhere near as noticeable when RB wasn't causing the Finder menu to pop up over top of Plex as my HTPC launches. Where I had a clean startup that went straight into Plex with the desktop never appearing I now have multiple flashes on the screen as RB and Plex fight for focus.

So can't we just agree that I won't use the "Hidden" checkbox, you'll warn me if I do, and RB will leave my login items alone with the exception of either adding it or removing it when I click the checkbox in preferences?

Thanks for your time and the product. It's an amazing tool! 

Remote Buddy re-creating the Launch Items every time was a bug and has been fixed with version 1.19.

When the issues caused by selecting "Hidden" in the Login Items came up first, I made Remote Buddy's menu detect and unhide the application at run time as necessary. It soon turned out, however, that this was not sufficient. In fact, there were more complex issues caused by selecting "Hidden", that users - IIRC even in this very forum - reported. The only viable fix for these issues is to re-create the entry and subsequently re-launch the application (which, unless the user selects "Hidden" again, only happens once). An info requester is not an option, because it, too, would be hidden and not be visible to the user.

If you're willing to live with possible side effects of having Remote Buddy launched hidden, please file a short support inquiry and I'll tell you how you can turn off this "auto-correction" in private. I've added that UI-less option to 1.19, too.

Best regards, 
Felix Schwarz