RE: Etrecheck results

Yes you can post them here for help understanding what they mean, but all that is really needed is the items in red.

Trouble Shooting Procedure

To diagnose a problem you must be able to associate a specific action with an identifiable outcome. There may be other tasks besides drag thing, steer mouse, application wizard, and dropbox that are also quiting but do not appear on the Dock. So for the moment those apps are your pass/fail flags. When you deactivated all of them you had no way to tell if your experiment passed of failed. Reactivating them simply restored the previous system state you already knew was failing. So in essence you have learned almost nothing.

To completely test the possibility that an app is causing these four and possibly other apps you are not seeing to quit it would be necessary to systematically remove all startup items, all Launch Daemons, and all Launch Agents in your user library. The easiest ones to start with would be your startup items — and not just the ones you know are quitting. But if you remove them all at one time there is no way to know the problem was fixed, because you have removed all your pass/fail flags.

The four failing apps are as good a place as any to start and I would suggest starting with one of your flag apps — my personal choice would be DragThing as it interacts with the Dock. To be completely and thoroughly methodical I would
  1. Verify the version of the app
  2. Check with the developer (not a third party bundler) to verify the version is the most recent compatible with your OS.
    1. if it is not the most recent compatible version, download and install the correct version (from the developer's website if at all possible) then proceed to step 4
    2. if it is the most current compatible version go to step 3
  3. Deactivate/uninstall the app
  4. Reboot and run the system for at least a few days or until the flag app(s) quit unexpectedly.
  5. IF the flag app(s) do NOT quit, go to Step 6 ELSE you have identified the culprit and you can…
    1. Contact the developer and report the problem (I would also report it to Apple)
    2. Replace it with another app that provides similar functionality
    3. Discard the app and live without it
    4. Exit the troubleshooting process.
  6. Strike the app you are testing off of the list of suspects, restore the system to its state before the test started and go to step 1
NOTE: if nothing is found in the Startup Items go to Launch Deamons and Launch Agents. Obviously this can take a good while unless the failures happen quickly and even then it can take days. I wish I could say this is guaranteed to find your problem, but that would be untrue. It will however find the problem if the initial assumption that the problem is in a third party app.

If you are running MacOS 10.12 (Sierra)
At the time of this post MacOS 10.12.2 is apparently in the final testing stages and contains among other things some bug fixes. Given this entire process could be very time consuming, you may want to postpone troubleshooting until after you have installed and tried MacOS 10.12.2.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein