How to disable apps from auto launch if I have already disabled them?
EDIT: Having re-read the question, my original answer may not be necessary. By default, when you log in, OS X opens all the windows you had open when you logged out. If you don't want it to do this, then uncheck the option "reopen windows when logging back in" that appears when you log out:



This should give you an empty desktop when you log back in. If not, then it's back to my original answer (below).



Some apps unfortunately don't respect that option, and create Launch Agents (processes that run at login) or sometimes Launch Daemons (which run at boot) to manage their lifecycle.

Such apps often do have a preference buried somewhere to change their login behaviour, so double-check that first, as that's always the safest solution.

If there isn't a preference, you can see what Launch Agents are running by going to your terminal and running:

launchctl list

If you want to see which Adobe-related agents are running, pipe the output to grep with something like:

launchctl list | grep -i adobe

If you see anything there, then it's likely that Adobe is using this mechanism. So what to do about it?

Have a look in the following folders to find files with the same names that you saw in the output of the launchctl command... in your case, probably called com.adobe.&lt;something&gt;.


~/Library/LaunchAgents 
/Library/LaunchAgents
/Library/LaunchDaemons
/System/Library/LaunchAgents
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons


Once you've found them, try renaming rather than deleting them (e.g. by adding ".ignore" to the end of their filenames). Then reboot to see if that's had the desired effect. If it has, you're good to go... but watch out for other side-effects in case the Launch Agent has more than one function, and be prepared to go through the process again whenever you receive a software update.

If it hasn't worked, restore their original filenames to avoid any undesired side-effects, and keep digging...