Finally, someone’s come up with the definitive – and as far as I know only – successful solution to turning of the OS X Lion Resume feature. This little trick from poster billearl will stop your Mac opening all the apps that were still running when you shutdown/restart.

1. Close all windows and quit all apps.

2. In Finder, hold down the Option key and click ‘Go’ in the menu bar at the top.

3. Choose ‘Library’ (you have to have the Option key held down to see Library in the menu).

4. Navigate to Library > Preferences > ByHost > com.apple.loginwindow.[xxxxxxxxx].plist

The [xxxxxxxx] represent some interminable string of numbers and letters. Don’t mistake it for the similarly entitled Unix executable file. What you need to check is that its ‘loginwindow’ and ‘.plist’ at the end.

5. When you’re sure you’ve identified the right file, select it and press Cmd-i to show the ‘Get Info’ window. Click the ‘Locked’ option.

6. Now, test that it works. Close the ‘Get info’ window and the finder window. Open up Safari, Preview and a couple of windows. Do a restart and behold — if you followed the instructions correctly — a clean desktop!

Now, a small word of caution. One thing this trick won’t do is stop your apps like Safari and Preview from re-opening the last page/file when you manually fire them up after restart. In order to get them to forget your last opened page/file, you also need to do this:

7. Go to the ~/Library/ Saved Application State folder.

8. Select all the contents inside and send them to Trash.

9. Right-click on the Saved Application State folder’s icon and choose ‘Get Info’ (or press cmd-i).

10. Click the ‘Locked’ option. If it’s greyed out, go down to the padlock at the bottom, click on that and enter your password. You should now be able to check the ‘Locked’ option.

And finally, after those ten (phew…) steps…no more Resume!