This has been asked over and over, but the solution I'm seeing everywhere is that these programs will remember to start minimized if they're properly exited (as in not shutting down the computer) minimized. Well, on my computer (running 11.04), that simply isn't true.

Two other suggestions I've seen are Pidgin's extprefs and Buddy List preferences, neither of which work for me or anyone else I've seen ask about this. I've also learned about kdocker in my search, but that isn't what I wanted either, because the programs still go to the tray when I do that.

One suggestion I thought of myself for quodlibet was having another startup application be "sleep 5 && quodlibet --hide-window", but that doesn't work because putting sleep in any of my startup applications just makes Ubuntu take longer to login and it doesn't affect any startup programs.

So, how can I get quodlibet and Pidgin to autostart at login without showing their windows? Or, alternatively, kdocker will work fine if there's some way I can get a complete list of all the tray icons so that rather than having Unity's tray set to "all", I can set it to everything except kdocker.