In earlier versions and latest Windows 10 version 1809, if you don’t close applications before shutdown or after a restart, they’ll open automatically on next start of computer, examples are notepad, wordpad, Firefox and this is a new feature. The good news is Microsoft offers a setting in October 2018 update to disable that (in fact it’s been there before as well, till now we don’t know about it), the bad news is it is combined with another setting. Here is some background on what happened.
Windows 10 1809: Disable automatic reopening of apps after restart
I. Sometime back, Redmond giant has added ‘Use my sign-in info to automatically finish setting up my device after update’ option to Windows 10 Settings and enabled it by default. With this, you’re giving consent to Windows to automatically sign into Windows 10 to complete the device setup after installing the updates.
II. Microsoft has added ‘reopen my apps or restart’ extra wording and made it like this:
“Use my sign-in info to automatically finish setting up my device and reopen my apps after an update or restart”.
To spot this in Windows 10, open Settings app > Accounts > Sign-in options > Privacy.
With this setting turned on by default, you’re giving permission to Windows 10 to use your credentials to auto-login to Windows and finish device setup after an update and also to reopen apps after the restart.
What happens is all the classic apps registered with Windows Restart Manager will open and launch themselves automatically like recent Firefox doing, so this is a global setting in Windows 10 to prevent programs from relaunching at Windows startup or restart.
Will you turn that off?