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when I am not using it, at some point, every day, my MBP tries to log out on its own. When I 'wake it up' I can see message windows about "applications aborting logout", obviously because some applications that needed to save data aren't allowing OSX to close them.

This is extremely irritating, because all applications that have nothing to save, will close down on me, sometimes in the middle of a long download.

My MBP isn't configured for hibernation, or logging out, or even sleeping. It's always does it on AC power and I simply have no idea why.

The problem started with Snow Leopard, and persists with Lion as well.

Output of my pmset utility is:

Active Profiles:
Battery Power       -1
AC Power        -1*
Currently in use:
 standbydelay   4200
 standby    0
 womp       1
 halfdim    1
 panicrestart   157680000
 hibernatefile  /var/vm/sleepimage
 sms        1
 networkoversleep   0
 disksleep  10
 sleep      0
 hibernatemode  3
 ttyskeepawake  1
 displaysleep   60
 acwake     0
 lidwake    1

Does anyone have a clue why my mac tries to shut down all the applications and logout when I don't use it for a few hours? How do I stop this?

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Have you tried creating a new user and seeing if the problem persists there? If the issue is in some obscure setting, it may be easier to delete your user preferences and start again than to try and debug this. – dan8394 Aug 17 '11 at 3:27
Once upon a time, I wrote a Windows application that logs off my computer at a certain time. Then I forgot about it. It ran one night and I couldn't figure it out for the longest time. Perhaps you have something obscure like that in a cron or other scheduler, like a idle-timeout log-off? – Randolph West Aug 17 '11 at 5:17

3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

I believe I discovered the culprit. The "security" settings have a "Log out after "x" hours of inactivity". It was checked on my MBP, but disabled visually due to the settings being locked. This is probably why I wasn't paying attention to it.

Unchecking this option, and letting run overnight, it did not try to log out. Problem resolved.

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Excellent, can I be cheeky and ask you to edit the title of this question to something more descriptive so future users will be able to search more effectively? Cheers,Dan – stuffe Aug 17 '11 at 14:52
I saw a similar question about this kind of issue here and the same fix was found. :) – macaco Aug 17 '11 at 15:37
up vote 2 down vote

For anyone trying to find this setting it is in the "Advanced..." section of the General tab or the Security and Privacy page in system preferences.

Disabling this feature fixed the same problem on my machine!

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Presumably by "this setting" Taylor means the setting described in the answer by ron M. – GEdgar Jun 8 '12 at 3:27
up vote 0 down vote

okay i have a much better solution for you. Go to mac appstore and download caffeine. It can keep your computer awake and more.

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