firewalld removal leaves disruptive remnant

[Dave Kelly]

After complete removal of firewalld service package (using sudo systemctl disable firewalld.service, sudo apt remove firewalld), a firewalld service authorization login prompt continues to pop up after system startup, immediately after regular login. This is after systemctl and apt can no longer find firewalld.

The problem is caused by a file, systemctl.desktop, located at: /home/dave/.config/autostart/
The file content while causing the problem was:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=systemctl start firewalld.service
Hidden=false
NoDisplay=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name[en_US]=Firewall
Name=Firewall
Comment[en_US]=Start Firewall
Comment=Start Firewall

I solved my immediate problem by commenting out the file contents with # hashtags at the beginning of each line. Implementing this method during removal of the package could be a solution, or just deleting this entry in the file might be better.

System details:
Acer Aspire VX5-591G, Intel® Core™ i7-7700HQ CPU
Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS jammy
Linux 6.5.0-25-generic x86-64
GNOME version 42.9