Luckymonkey

(Via http://daringfireball.net/ )

The progress bar & window which you see when OS X starts up is nothing but a window popped up by the login window process starting, which it then promptly terminates once it’s ready for you to actually log in.

It’s all just smoke and mirrors!

You can start this process off for yourself (if you’re feeling nerdy and bored), following these simple instructions..

To start the window process off  :

/usr/libexec/WaitingForLoginWindow

This will pop the window up onto the screen. Don’t worry, it doesn’t do anything, other than move the progress bar from the left to the right.. Once you’re bored of that trick, then you can kill it doing the following :

killall WaitingForLoginWindow

If you can SSH into a machine, then you can run it, and watch the confused user work out what is going on with their machine..