A lot of problems like these are caused by saved sessions. For example start one desktop environment, quit, start another that saves your session on exit and those stupid desktop daemons get into the session because they don't all close down.

I was actually having that problem with stuff still loading even though I removed everything from XDG autostart. It turned out to be in my stored session so I started just quitting without saving it.

We are on the same page there. I saw the same thing happen to me many years ago and stopped using sessions. I see their value for some people, just not for me. :)

FYI I just installed rlworkman's XFCE 4.14 packages for -current on my desktop, and I'm having a similar issue. KDE's notification daemon is overriding XFCE's which results in notifications not showing at all (see my previous comment re: plasma_waitforname).

Interesting. I don't know whether this topic is related. I haven't yet tested.

Basically, enable GNOME services.

Not sure - but deleting /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.kde.plasma.Notifications.service while running XFce fixes the issue (as expected).