Caution: missing preloaded wallets issues in Bitcoin Core

So I had a bunch of wallets open in Bitcoin Core that would pop up right when I launched it. But then I deleted one of the wallet files, and every time I started Bitcoin Core after that, I kept getting this annoying "wallet path that doesn't exist" warning. Plus, the wallet and database wouldn’t load until I dismissed the pop-up. It started to really bug me, especially when I began deleting more wallets that I didn’t plan to use anymore. Before I knew it, Bitcoin Core was throwing more and more of these warnings at me, getting up to four at one point. I’d always close them, but they were really irritating. When there were just a couple it was manageable, but that just made it worse as I got rid of more wallets. I tried a bunch of fixes, but nothing worked. I checked the wallets folder to see if anything was left over from the ones I deleted. I even tried editing, deleting, and recreating the wallets folder... set the bitcoin.conf file to only load a specific wallet... but nothing changed. Finally, while poking around in the bitcoin database folder, I stumbled on a settings.json file. It had the names of almost all the wallets I’d opened or created. I figured I’d try removing the names of some non-existent wallets that I thought might be causing the issue, like "wallet" and "wallet1". Once I did that, the annoying warnings vanished. Just thought I’d share this tip for anyone who might run into the same problem in the future.

Such error can be avoided if you instead unload the wallet first before deleting them. That's because loading a wallet file via GUI automatically set it to "load_on_startup: true" which tells Core to load it on start; Deleting the wallet file will break that behavior since it's supposed to load the deleted wallet. Since you're using Bitcoin-qt, simply use the menu: "File->Close Wallet" and the currently selected wallet in the drop-down menu (on the right) will be unloaded and deleted from the settings.json file. Then you can delete that specific test wallet file even without closing Bitcoin Core.