userdefaults is never synchronized back to the system

[zgiles]

It appears that although [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] is picked up by the app to recall the last preferences saved by the user, the users preferences are never saved.
It appears that the Checkbox to make it start at startup only works by checking if it was started by the LaunchAtLogin piece, which is set the checkbox to check, and update the preferences, but not sync them back into OSX.
Maybe this should be fixed in the 1.x line before any restructuring of data / user prefs.

See here for some details...
http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/iphone/nsuserdefaults_iphone-sdk/
(Yes, that's for ios, but it works the same)