Appearance of mysterious servers in OSX "Recent Items"

October 11, 2011 9:25 AM

Appearance of mysterious servers in OSX "Recent Items."

Yesterday, I noticed the following three server names in my "Recent Items" in OSX 10.6.6:

[C] Windows 7 (Retry)
[E] Windows 7 (Retry)
Config

I've never noticed any servers in my "Recent Items" before, although I only have occasion to open up the "Recent Items" menu maybe once a week or so.

There are two computers with Windows on my (passworded) network, but I've never tried to connect to either of them in any way that I'm aware of.

The only Internet stuff I've done recently is visit sites on a web browser and download a couple PDFs. Haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary except that (probably totally irrelevant) for a few days all my YouTube videos (in Firefox only, not in Chrome) were restarting after about 10-30 seconds, but today that problem seems to have gone away.

Any idea what might be going on here? Happy to provide more info as needed. Thanks in advance!

posted by Cucurbit to computers & internet (4 answers total)

Sounds like some kind of network location awareness or auto-discovery is afoot. Can you browse to these computers?
posted by samsara at 8:23 AM on October 12, 2011

Also, are you running boot camp or a virtual machine?
posted by samsara at 10:07 AM on October 12, 2011

Thanks for your answer, samsara. No, I'm not running Boot Camp or a virtual machine. I don't think I can browse to the other computers on my network -- I don't see any evidence of them anywhere (when I browse to "Network" from the "Devices" area of the file manager, there's nothing there, nor are there any connected servers showing up in the file manager).
posted by Cucurbit at 8:50 PM on October 12, 2011

Ah darn, I was hoping that would be it. I asked a friend of mine who is more of a Mac guru, she mentioned that you normally wouldn't see the [C] or [E] parts on regular windows PCs, but more from bootcamp ones. If they aren't brows-able, it might be possible one was on your network briefly. Very odd indeed, sorry I couldn't be of more help!
posted by samsara at 5:57 AM on October 17, 2011