Adobe Unbidden

1 Jun 2020 11:44:28

Trevor Hewson

A weird icon has appeared in the iMac's menu bar. It looks like two chain links, filled in black. Against my better judgement, having found no Google enlightenment, I finally plucked up courage to click on it and was presented with a sign in page for Adobe Creative Cloud. I've no idea where this came from and, apart from elderly copies of Photoshop Elements and no doubt an Acrobat Reader buried somewhere, we don't knowingly use any Adobe software.

The icon has only recently appeared and is present regardless of which of us logs in. Any ideas on why it might have appeared and how to evict it and any related Adobe stowaways would be appreciated.

Re: Adobe Unbidden

2 Jun 2020 15:41:22

Tony Still

Worrying that it just appeared. Do you perhaps have auto-update to equivalent set on the Adobe products that you do have installed?

First place to look is System Prefs > Users & Groups under your own account. Click the 'Login Items' tab and see if it's there. If so, untick it.

If it's not there (bet it isn't!), then look in Library/StartupItems (the system library, not your account's library). If it's there, move it somewhere harmless (eg Desktop) and ensure that your Mac runs OK after a reboot before deleting it.

If it's not there, then someone will need to do a little more research.

Re: Adobe Unbidden

4 Jun 2020 08:00:24

Trevor Hewson

Hello Tony. Thanks a lot. I've done the first step and checked the Login Items. No Adobe culprits in Mary's items (but a few other historic strays which have been exorcised). I had ElementsAutoAnalyser in my list, so that's gone too now. I'll see if the symbol disappears after the next weekly restart and follow up after that.

Re: Adobe Unbidden

7 Jun 2020 09:01:37

Trevor Hewson

After installing the latest security update and restarting, the symbol is still there, but greyed out. Nothing in the Startupitems folder either.

Re: Adobe Unbidden

7 Jun 2020 11:09:21

Andrew Kemp

Could it be in /Library/LaunchAgents and /Library/LaunchDaemons? That's how Microsoft's auto-update application is set up, for example.

Adobe apparently offer an official Creative Cloud uninstaller application for macOS, which would presumably be the proper way of getting rid of it (if you are sure that you don't need Creative Cloud at all).

If you are just looking to get rid of the menu bar icon (without actually uninstalling anything) then it sounds as though there may be an option for that within the software itself.

Re: Adobe Unbidden

7 Jun 2020 15:49:05

Trevor Hewson

Thanks Andrew. I’ll have a look at those links In due course. Meanwhile, I’ll keep an eye on the icon to see if it ‘un-greys’ itself at any point.

Re: Adobe Unbidden

25 Jun 2020 19:57:29

Trevor Hewson

Update: Today the greyed out icon came to life again. In the panel which it opens, up offering all the various sign-in options, I spotted the three dots icon (like a vertical ellipsis). This gave me a popup menu, one entry of which was 'Quit'. I selected this and the whole thing duly vanished.

If it reappears, I really will have to look at the uninstaller app that Andrew mentioned.