HID Explorer on startup

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Hey guys,

just a quick question I hope you might be able to answer...

Every time I start my Mac, I get an instance of HID Explorer that opens up. I know this, as I see 'HID Explorer' listed on the top left of the screen, showing me that it is open.

Does anybody know what this is? I have installed a number of applications since first getting my Mac, so could it be tied to one of these applications?

Any way I can get the Mac to start up normally, without having this HID Explorer boot up automatically? I'm pretty sure it never used to do this?

Thanks in advance,
Munkee
 

chscag

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Have you recently downloaded and installed any of the Apple Developer Kits? The HID Explorer is included with those kits. It may be starting automatically whenever you boot. Open System Preferences, Users & Groups. Click on the Login Items tab to see if it's listed there. If it is, remove it.
 
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Nope, I haven't installed any developer kits.

The only thing I have 'ticked' in the login items is 'iTuneshelper'. There are four instances of 'Inklet' in the login items (none of them ticked) and they are listed as unknown in the 'kind' column. Not sure what they are.

I did install a driver for a USB add-on (the 'portal of power' for the video game 'Skylanders') for my son to use. This driver seems to autostart every time my Mac boots, even though this is not listed in the login items. Could this be the culprit?

Thanks,
Munkee
 
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chas_m

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I think you've found the culprit. HID stands for Human Interface Device (basically, USB game connectors like joysticks, gamepads et al).
 
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I think you've found the culprit. HID stands for Human Interface Device (basically, USB game connectors like joysticks, gamepads et al).

Thanks chas_m.

Do you know of a way to stop this from auto loading when I boot my Mac? It's not listed in my login items, but there must be some other way of stopping something from auto starting. On a PC, I would just untick the item in the startup items (msconfig), but I'm not sure how to do this on a Mac.

Thanks again,
Munkee
 

chscag

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If it's not listed in Login items, you'll have to ferret it out. But first we need to know which version of OS X you're currently running as it makes a difference on how we find it.
 
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If it's not listed in Login items, you'll have to ferret it out. But first we need to know which version of OS X you're currently running as it makes a difference on how we find it.

Thanks chscag.

I'm currently on OS X Snow Leopard.

Thanks again,
Munkee
 
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chas_m

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There is also an item in the main Library (located at the root level of your HD) called StartUpItems, perhaps it's hiding in there.
 
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There is also an item in the main Library (located at the root level of your HD) called StartUpItems, perhaps it's hiding in there.

Nope, it's not in there. Any other ideas?
 
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HID Explorer on start up

Hi Munkee - did you ever solve how to get rid of the HID explorer on start up. I have same problem. Hope you can help. It is to do with Skylander game.
 
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Hey everyone...

I just found that the app has all of the stuff in it, go to applications and find the spyro folder - it's in there. BTW, did anyone get the portal to work? Mine was installed, the game saw it, it just didn't work. Then you get this annoying app running in the background all of the time. Why is the mac always developed half-assed when it comes to this stuff? Why can't developers start here and then migrate to PC's?
 
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HID Explorer

I also had the same problem, it starts up looking for the portal from Skylanders. Since I never got the portal to work... I removed the Spyro Folder. I left it in the trash a few times to make sure there were no errors looking for the missing files on startup. Totally no problem now, and no HID Explorer on startup anymore. I had to manually enter the Skylanders ID codes anyway since the portal never worked on my Mac.
This should fix your problem.
 
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Hello thirdrow & group,

Thanks to everyone for posting this -- I've been dealing with this ever since we fired up Skylanders at Christmas time. It was simply an "annoyance" for some time, but eventually we all like to rid ourselves of such inconveniences. What good is a Mac if it's as cluttered and clunky as a Windows machine...

@thirdrow: We did, eventually, get the portal driver to work, but wow it was buggy. In the end, we figured out that it was just faster and easier (though much less fun) to use the card codes. My kids haven't really latched onto the online game anyway -- compared to the fluidity of the Wii version, the web game really pales.
 
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I had the same question... Every time I started my Mac (or logged in?), HID Explorer would start up, with the dock icon called SpyroPortalDriver. I could see that there was a SpyroPortal folder in /Applications, but I couldn't figure out how it was launching itself on startup. Eventually I figured it out. ;)

Look in /Library/LaunchAgents/. I had a SpyroDriverDaemon.plist file sitting there. I moved it to my desktop, restarted, and voila, problem solved! I prefer this approach because, if I want to run the SpyroPortalDriver, I still can by launching it from /Applications/SpyroPortal/.

This is on Snow Leopard... Not sure if it works the same way on Lion. I'm also not sure if the driver works the same way whether it's run by launchd at startup / login or manually. But at least it isn't autorunning any more.

Cheers,
Matt
 
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Remove SpyroPortalDriver's automatic startup.

The portal driver software for Skylanders uses MacOS's launchd system to start whenever someone logs in. You can remove the launchd entry from the system (without uninstalling the software from /Applications, so you can run it on demand) by launching /Applications/Utilities/Terminal and in the terminal window running the following command:

launchctl remove `launchctl list | grep -i spyro | awk '{print $3}'`

If the portal driver is running when you issue this command it should stop.

Then you need to remove the file /Library/LaunchAgents/SpyroPortalDriverDaemon.plist

sudo rm /Library/LaunchAgents/SpyroPortalDriverDaemon.plist

Removing SpyroPortalDriverDaemon.plist is all that is REALLY necessary, but the first command saves you from having to log out / log in to kill the software cleanly.

This way, if you get the portal working, you can just launch it from applications when you're going to play, and not have manually stop it the rest of the time.
 

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