Is there a good book or article on using launchd and its future for replacing other program-launching programs? Preferably something with examples to illustrate running launchd in the context of a program? Specifically, I manage multiple labs of Macs all running MacOS X 10.5.6 and I'd like to kick off some processes, some as root, some as the user: - add a link icon to the dock so the user has one-click access to a shared SMB volume. I have been using a Python script to add this dock icon but knowing when to run the Python script is tricky; on some machines this works perfectly every time, on other machines running MacOS X 10.5.6, the dock icon script doesn't run. I'm guessing I want to run this Python script in the dock context but I'm not sure if that's correct. - will launchd replace login/logout scripts run as root? I'd like to clear the print queues on the machine (using CUPS' "cancel -a" run as root) when the user logs out. I'd like to do this without prompting the user for admin credentials (which our users don't have); print jobs left at logout time should simply be cancelled/deleted. - some programs don't take preference settings via MCX (Adobe CS3's Acrobat, for instance) and I'll need to set certain preferences for the user every time they login via a script (turning off Adobe Acrobat's Javascript, for example). I'm trying to limit running scripts as the user to functions our users would like to have done for them, rather than enforcing policy or attempting any security setting by running scripts as the user. It's my hope that by doing this the user won't have any incentive to want to disable running those scripts. Thanks for your help.