1Password-BrowserSupport.exe leaks ~60 processes/hour until Windows becomes unusable (traced: helper never exits after native messaging disconnect)
Environment: Windows 11, 1Password 8.12.26 (reproduced on both the Microsoft Store build and the direct download; fresh reinstall does not help). Browser extension installed in Chrome, Yandex Browser and Edge.
Summary: 1Password-BrowserSupport.exe never exits when its native messaging channel closes. Since Chromium-based browsers regularly suspend and restart MV3 extension service workers, every restart spawns a new helper (plus its conhost.exe), and the old one stays alive forever. The result is a steady leak of roughly one process per minute per browser, 24/7, that slowly kills the whole machine.
Measured impact on my system (Ryzen 9 7950X, 64 GB RAM):
- After ~2.5 days of uptime: 2,510 × 1Password-BrowserSupport.exe + 2,520 × conhost.exe = 5,399 total processes (normal for this machine is ~370).
- Commit charge 83 GB of 127 GB.
- Ephemeral UDP port exhaustion (Tcpip event 4266), DNS timeouts.
- Performance counter subsystem failing with WMI quota violations — Task Manager's Performance tab hangs.
- System-wide input freezes for ~1 minute every time the display wakes (power/session notifications being broadcast to 5,000+ processes).
- Several hard system lockups while idle, logged as Kernel-Power 41 with bugcheck code 0.
Rebooting "fixes" it for about two days, which is exactly how long the leak takes to reach critical mass — this masquerades as many unrelated hardware problems (I ruled out RAM with a full MemTest86+ pass and updated GPU/chipset drivers before finding the real cause).
How I traced it: subscribing to Win32_Process creation events shows the spawn chain clearly. Each time a browser restarts the extension's service worker, it launches:
cmd.exe /d /s /c ""...\1Password-BrowserSupport.exe" chrome-extension://aeblfdkhhhdcdjpifhhbdiojplfjncoa/ --parent-window=0"
< \\.\pipe\chrome.nativeMessaging.in.… > \\.\pipe\chrome.nativeMessaging.out.…
A new helper appears roughly every 60 seconds (one per browser with the extension enabled), and no helper ever exits — the process count only grows. All spawned helpers survive their parent and their pipe. Timestamps of accumulated processes show a flat ~40 spawns/hour around the clock, including hours when the machine is untouched.
Note also that the helpers are protected from termination (access denied from a non-elevated context), so regular users can't even clean this up without admin rights.
Expected behavior: the helper should exit when its stdin pipe closes, like any native messaging host.
Current workarounds I'm using:
- Hourly scheduled task running as SYSTEM: kill 1Password-BrowserSupport.exe processes older than 10 minutes (first run killed 122 of them; active connections just reconnect, nothing breaks).
- Alternatively, disabling "unlock with the desktop app" integration in the extension stops the spawning entirely.
Related reports: this looks like the same issue as the "BrowserSupport process spam" topic (June 24) and "1Password Browser Support process keeps opening new processes" (July 10) — users there report the same on Windows 10/11, including on the beta channel.
Could you confirm this is a known defect and share a timeline for a fix? Happy to provide the full process-creation trace, event log extracts, or run a diagnostic build.