Sounds like something with xdg. I would check in the etc/xdg directory or ~/.config/autostart and see if there is anything there related to it. That or looking in the session settings or the files for your session and see what those say. Really depends what you are using, that would determine what was causing them to pop up.
Hmm, checked those and I see no hard-wired environment variable settings etc.
The behavior was honestly very hard to understand, in that from one day/one login/one copy of the file manager to the next, I could not predict whether either plugging an encrypted USB drive in*, or even just running the file manager from the command line, would cause a window to pop up in the local X session, or the one held by XRDP. Obviously, there was some 'logic' involved there, whether I could spot it or not, and whether or not they would accept patches to fix it.
I really am past giving a fuck about any cunts hopping on the Wayland shitwagon like the XFCE and Gnome faggots, I will just keep using classic PCManFM because it hasn't adopted any of that crap.
* which for some fucking reason, when it happens in a 'modern' Linux GUI application, blocks trying to unlock the LUKS drive in any other 'modern' application. Despite the fact that A) you could still just open the LUKS container manually with 'cryptsetup' and then mount it B) there was no reason for this to be blocking, literally all that had to be done was to have an existing attempt to unlock the drive be closed if another effort succeeded
If I recall correctly, the OSX display system is based off of the PDF specification.
They still have a lower layer (as things running on OpenGL and Metal don't need to be rendering a raster image in a PDF that then gets displayed), but it is used for many applications and is pretty cool riff of concepts originally developed in Sun NeWS in the mid-80s, but with PostScript at the time of course.